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 ROUTINE AND IDEALS. i6mo, $1.00 net. 
 Postage extra. 
 
 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND CHARACTER. 
 i6mo, $1.00 net. Postage 8 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
ROUTINE AND 
 IDEALS 
 
 By LeBaron Russell Briggs 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1904 
 
 
LIBRA! 
 
 
 Two Copies 
 
 Received 
 
 NOV 8 
 
 1904 
 
 Copyriffftt 
 
 tniry 
 
 CLASS CL XXc, No; J 
 /£) / 6 / »+- 
 
 copy e, J 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT I904 BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published November , IQ04 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Of the papers collected in this volume the 
 " Commencement Address at Wellesley 
 College " has been printed in pamphlet 
 form ; the "Address to the School Chil- 
 dren of Concord " appears in the memo- 
 rial volume issued by The Social Circle 
 in Concord and is reprinted with the per- 
 mission of John Shepard Keyes, Esq. ; 
 " The Mistakes of College Life " belongs 
 in a volume of Belmont (California) 
 School Talks and is printed here with 
 the permission of Mr. William T. Reid ; 
 "Harvard and the Individual" is re- 
 printed from the Boston Transcript with 
 the permission of Mr. E. H. Clement; 
 and "Mater Fortissima' , has appeared 
 in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine. 
 
 The book, like its predecessor, "School, 
 College, and Character," contains no 
 new ideas and only a few old ones. In 
 
vm 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 this respect it is much like other collec- 
 tions of sermons — for that the addresses 
 are sermons there is no denying. Ser- 
 mons or a single sermon ; and the text 
 is twofold : "Be thou faithful unto death," 
 and " Where there is no vision the peo- 
 ple perish." 
 
 L. B. R. BRIGGS. 
 
 Cambridge, September, 1904. 
 
TO ADAMS SHERMAN HILL 
 
 EVERY PART OF THIS BOOK THA T WILL BEAR 
 HIS SCRUTINY IS AFFECTIONA TEL Y DEDICA TED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. ROUTINE AND IDEALS : A SCHOOL AND 
 
 COLLEGE ADDRESS i 
 
 II. HARVARD AND THE INDIVIDUAL . . 39 
 
 III. ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN OF 
 
 CONCORD 63 
 
 IV. COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT WELLES- 
 
 LEY COLLEGE 91 
 
 V. DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE . 137 
 VI. THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE LIFE . . 183 
 VII. MATER FORTISSIMA ,223 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 A SCHOOL AND COLLEGE ADDRESS 
 
 THE older I grow, the more strongly I 
 feel that the best thing in man or wo- 
 man is being " there." Physical bravery, 
 which is always inspiring, is surprisingly 
 common ; but the sure and steady quality 
 of being " there " belongs to compara- 
 tively few. This is why we hear on every 
 hand, " If you want a thing well done, 
 do it yourself; " not because the man who 
 wants it done is best able to do it* but 
 because to many persons it seems a hope- 
 less quest to look for any one who cares 
 enough for them, who can put himself 
 vigorously enough into their places, to 
 give them his best, to give them intelli- 
 gent, unremitting, loyal service until the 
 job is done, — not half done, or nine 
 
4 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 tenths done, or ninety-nine hundredths 
 done, but done, with intelligence and de- 
 votion in every nail he drives, or every 
 comma he writes. Some are reluctant, 
 some afraid of doing more than they are 
 paid for, some indifferent, some obli- 
 gingly helpful but not well trained and 
 not so deeply devoted as to train them- 
 selves. I suppose that in one sphere of 
 life or another a number of these persons 
 earn what they get. Yet sometimes I 
 think there are only two kinds of ser- 
 vice, — that which is not worth having 
 at any price, and that for which no 
 money can pay. All of us know a few 
 who give this latter kind of service, and 
 know what they are to us, and to every 
 one with whom they deal. These are 
 the people who are " there." 
 
 Now being "there" is the result of 
 three things, — intelligence, constant 
 practice, and something hard to define 
 but not too fancifully called an ideal. Of 
 intelligence everybody can see the need ; 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 5 
 
 but not everybody knows how little 
 quickness of mind is required. As Sena- 
 tor Hoar once told the highest scholars 
 in Harvard College, much of the good 
 work in the world has been that of dull 
 men who have done their best. Moder- 
 ate intelligence, with devotion behind it, 
 and with constant exercise in the right 
 direction, has produced some of the most 
 valuable among men and women. 
 n! The best thing education can do is to 
 make moral character efficient through 
 mental discipline. Here we come to the*^ 
 need of training, and to the question 
 whether the education of to-day trains 
 boys and girls (I do not say as it should, 
 but as it might) for thorough, and re- 
 sponsible, and unselfish work. 
 
 Professor A. S. Hill cautions writers 
 against " announcing platitudes as if 
 they were oracles," and against " apolo- 
 gizing for them as if they were original 
 sin." I am in danger of both these trans- 
 gressions. In proclaiming that there is no 
 
6 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 education without hard work, I may seem 
 to proclaim a platitude of the first water ; 
 yet you can hardly call any proposition 
 a platitude if its acceptance depends on 
 its interpretation. To me the proposi- 
 tion means, nobody can get an education 
 without working for it ; to some others 
 it appears to mean, nobody can get an 
 education without other people's work- 
 ing to give it to him, or even to make 
 him like it well enough to take it ; and 
 my interpretation, that he cannot get it 
 without working hard himself, though it 
 strikes me as so obvious that I am half 
 ashamed to mention it, strikes others as 
 a reversion to a narrow and harsh con- 
 servatism, to the original sin of a time 
 when an education was a Procrustes 
 bed, which now strained and stretched 
 the mind until it broke, and now lopped 
 every delicate outgrowth of the soul. 
 
 Of all discoveries in modern education 
 the most beautiful is the recognition of 
 individual need and individual claim, 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 7 
 
 of the infinite and fascinating variety in 
 human capacity, of the awful responsi- 
 bility for those who by the pressure of 
 dull routine would stifle a human soul, 
 of the almost divine mission for those 
 who help a human soul into the fulness 
 of life. For what is nearer the divine 
 than to see that a child has life, and 
 has it more abundantly? "The past was 
 wrong," says the educator of to-day; " let 
 us right it. Education has been dark 
 and cruel ; let us make it bright and 
 kind." Thus it comes to pass that, as 
 many a prosperous father whose boy- 
 hood was pinched by poverty is deter- 
 mined that his son shall not suffer as he 
 himself has suffered, and throws away 
 on him money which he in turn throws 
 away on folly and on vice, — as such a 
 father saps a young man's strength in 
 trying to be generous, so does many 
 an educator of to-day, atoning for the 
 cruelty of the past by the enervating 
 luxury of the present, sap a child's 
 
8 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 strength in trying to be kind, change a 
 Procrustes bed to a bed of roses. Cruel 
 as it is to assume that a boy or a girl 
 who is dull in one or two prescribed 
 subjects is a dunce, it may be equally 
 cruel to watch every inclination of the 
 young mind, and to bend school re- 
 quirements to its desires and whims. 
 How many persons we know whose 
 lives and whose friends' lives are em- 
 bittered because they have had from 
 childhood their own way, and who, if 
 their eyes are once opened to the sel- 
 fishness of their position, denounce the 
 weakness of those who in their child- 
 hood yielded to them ! Unless we aban- 
 don as obsolete the notion that children 
 are the better for obedience, why should 
 we give them full swing in the choice 
 of a time for doing sums or for learning 
 to read ? If we do not insist that a boy 
 shall brush his hair till he longs to have 
 it smooth, and if then we brush it for 
 him, we are not educating him in either 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 9 
 
 neatness or efficiency; and for aught 
 I can see, the analogy holds good. I 
 once knew a boy of sixteen or seven- 
 teen whose mother had done most of 
 his reading for him. His eyes were 
 sharp enough for things he liked (such 
 as turtles and snakes); but he had 
 trained them so little in the alphabet that 
 in Latin he was quite impartial in decid- 
 ing whether u followed by t was ut or 
 tu. The effect on his translation may be 
 easily conceived. I do not mean that he 
 made this particular mistake many times ; 
 I mean that he was constantly making 
 mistakes of this character ; that in general 
 he had not been trained to observe just 
 what were the letters before him, or in 
 what order they came. Why then teach 
 him Latin? He was to be a scientific 
 man, and needed some language beside 
 his own : yet how could he learn a foreign 
 language ? how could he learn his own 
 language ? how could he learn anything 
 from a book ? how was he training him- 
 
io ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 self to be " there " ? " Do not make a 
 child read," some educators say, "until 
 he finds the need of reading, and learns 
 for his own pleasure. Do not enfeeble 
 his mind by forcing it." "Do not en- 
 feeble his mind," one might answer, " by 
 letting it go undisciplined." If he begins 
 late, when he has felt the need, he may 
 learn to read rapidly ; but will he have 
 the patience for those small accuracies 
 which form the basis of accuracy in later 
 life, and which, unless learned early, are 
 seldom learned at all ? Do not give the 
 child long hours ; do not take away the 
 freshness of his mind by pressing him ; 
 go slowly, but go thoroughly. Teach 
 him, whatever he does, to do it as well 
 as he can. Then show him how next 
 time he can do better ; and when next 
 time comes, make him do better. How- 
 ever short the school hours may be, 
 however much outside of the school may 
 rouse or charm his mind, make him feel 
 that school standards are high, that 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS n 
 
 school work is to be done, and done well. 
 If you are teaching a girl to sweep, you 
 do not let her sweep the lint under the 
 table. Why, if you are teaching a child 
 to study, should you let him study in a 
 slovenly way ? Why, for instance, should 
 you teach him reading without spelling? 
 Get into him as early as you can a habit 
 of thoroughness as an end in itself, of 
 thoroughness for its own sake, and he 
 will soon find that being thorough is 
 interesting; that against the pain of 
 working when he feels indolent, he may 
 match the pain of not doing what ought 
 to be done, just as one kind of microbe 
 is injected to kill another. When he 
 once gets this habit firmly fixed in him 
 (I may say, when it has once fixed itself 
 upon him), he may have all sorts of in- 
 tellectual freedom and be safe. 
 .: Immature people constantly cry out 
 against routine. Yet routine is an almost 
 necessary condition of effective human 
 life. An undisciplined genius, like Shel- 
 
12 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 ley's, inspires now and then ; a spirit like 
 Milton's, as eager for liberty, and as 
 impatient of bondage, yet forced, by the 
 man it animated, to do his bidding, 
 which rightly or wrongly he believed to 
 be the bidding of God, inspires oftener 
 and deeper. If routine is forced upon us, 
 we are delivered from the great tempta- 
 tion of letting industry become a matter 
 of caprice, and of waiting for perfect 
 mental and physical conditions (Italiam 
 fugientem ) before we settle down to our 
 work. If routine is not forced upon us, 
 we must force it upon ourselves, or we 
 shall go to pieces. " Professor X is a 
 dry teacher. Shakspere is the greatest 
 of poets, and hence one of the greatest 
 inspirers of men. Why is n't it better to 
 cut Professor X's lecture and read Shak- 
 spere, — or even to read Kipling ?" First 
 and obviously, because you can read 
 Shakspere at another time, whereas Pro- 
 fessor X's lecture is given at a fixed hour, 
 is part of a course, and a link in an im- 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 13 
 
 portant chain. Next, because attending 
 Professor X's lecture is for the time be- 
 ing your business. The habit of attend- 
 ing to business is a habit you must form 
 and keep, before you can be regarded 
 as "there." Moreover this habit does 
 away with all manner of time-wasting 
 indecision. If you take the hour for 
 Shakspere, you may spend half of it 
 in questioning what play to begin, or 
 whether to read another author after all, 
 — and meantime a friend drops in. "I 
 know a person," says Professor James, 
 " who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, 
 pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange 
 his table, snatch up the newspaper, take 
 down any book which catches his eye, 
 trim his nails, waste the morning any- 
 how, in short, and all without premedi- 
 tation, — simply because the one thing 
 he ought to attend to is the preparation 
 of a noon-day lesson in formal logic 
 which he detests — anything but that! " 
 It is astonishing how eagerly men strug- 
 
14 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 gle to escape from the training that pre- 
 pares them for life, how they labor to 
 convince themselves that what they long 
 to do is worthier and nobler than what 
 they ought to do — and must do if they 
 are to succeed in what they long to do. 
 I once knew a student, against all ad- 
 vice, to leave college in the middle of 
 the Freshman year, because, since he 
 was going into the ministry, he was 
 eager to devote his whole time to the 
 Bible. Later he saw his mistake, and 
 came back. I knew another and a wiser 
 student who, having gone into the min- 
 istry without a college education, left it 
 for years of sacrifice in money and of the 
 hardest kind of work, to win that know- 
 ledge of books and men without which 
 no modern minister is equipped for effi- 
 cient service. The efficient people are 
 those who know their business and do it 
 promptly and patiently, who when lei- 
 sure comes have earned it, and know 
 they have earned it ; who when one 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 15 
 
 thing is done can turn their attention 
 squarely and completely to the next 
 thing, and do that. The efficient student 
 is he who has as nearly as possible a 
 fixed time for every part of his work ; 
 who, if he has a recitation at ten and 
 another at twelve, knows in advance 
 what he is to study at eleven. He has 
 most time for work and most time for 
 unalloyed play, since he makes use of 
 that invaluable friend to labor, — routine. 
 " Habit,' ' says the Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast Table, "is a labor-saving invention 
 which enables a man to get along with 
 less fuel, — that is all; for fuel is force, 
 you know, just as much in the page I 
 am writing for you as in the locomo- 
 tive or the legs which carry it to you." 
 i * Habit," says Professor James, " simplifies 
 our movements, makes them accurate, 
 and diminishes fatigue." " Man, " he 
 continues, " is born with a tendency to 
 do more things than he has ready-made 
 arrangements for in his nerve-centres. 
 
16 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 Most of the performances of other animals 
 are automatic. But in him the number of 
 them is so enormous that most of them 
 must be the fruit of painful study. If 
 practice did not make perfect, nor habit 
 economize the expense of nervous and 
 muscular energy, he would be in a sorry 
 plight. As Dr. Maudsley says : 'If an 
 act became no easier after being done 
 several times, if the careful direction of 
 consciousness were necessary to its ac- 
 complishment on each occasion, it is 
 evident that the whole activity of a life- 
 time might be confined to one or two 
 deeds — that no progress could take place 
 in development. A man might be oc- 
 cupied all day in dressing and undress- 
 ing himself; the attitude of his body 
 would absorb all his attention and en- 
 ergy ; the washing of his hands or the 
 fastening of a button would be as diffi- 
 cult to him on each occasion as to the 
 child on its first trial ; and he would, 
 furthermore, be completely exhausted by 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 17 
 
 his exertions.' " " The great thing, then, 
 in all education," says Professor James, 
 "is to make our nervous system our ally 
 instead of our enemy. It is to fund and 
 capitalize our acquisitions, and live at 
 ease upon the interest of the fund. For 
 this we must make automatic and habit- 
 ual, as early as possible, as many useful 
 actions as we can, and guard against 
 the growing into ways that are likely 
 to be disadvantageous to us, as we 
 should guard against the plague. The 
 more of the details of our daily life we 
 can hand over to the effortless custody 
 of automatism, the more our higher 
 powers of mind will be set free for their 
 own proper work. There is no more 
 miserable human being than one in 
 whom nothing is habitual but indeci- 
 sion. . . . Full half the time of such a 
 man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of 
 matters which ought to be so ingrained 
 in him as practically not to exist for his 
 consciousness at all. If there be such 
 
18 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 daily duties not yet ingrained in any one 
 of my readers, let him begin this very 
 hour to set the matter right." 
 
 All this shows the true meaning of 
 thoroughness. I have heard it said that 
 thoroughness in education is precisely 
 what we do not want, since thorough 
 work becomes mechanical work, and 
 robs the student of that creative joy 
 which should accompany every exercise 
 of the mind. Yet it is the "effortless 
 custody of automatism" in the lower 
 things that frees the mind for creative 
 joy in the higher. The pianist who 
 cannot through long practice commit 
 to routine all the ordinary movements of 
 the fingers on the keys can never play 
 the music of Schumann or of Beethoven. 
 Sometimes I think that our happiness 
 depends chiefly on our cheerful accept- 
 ance of routine, on our refusal to as- 
 sume, as many do, that daily work and 
 daily duty are a kind of slavery. If 
 we can learn to think of routine as 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 19 
 
 the best economy, we shall not despise 
 it. People call it benumbing ; and so it 
 is if we do not understand it : but if we 
 understand that through it we can do 
 more work in less time, and have more 
 time left for the expansion of our souls, 
 that through it we cultivate the habit 
 which makes people know we can be 
 counted on, we shall cease to say hard 
 things of it. Even in those whose lives 
 are narrowly circumscribed, we see the 
 splendid courage and fidelity which 
 come with faithful routine. The longer 
 I live, the more I admire as a class the 
 women who fill small positions in New 
 England public schools, the typical 
 schoolmistresses or " schoolmarms " of 
 our more Puritanical towns and villages. 
 Their notions of English grammar are 
 as inflexible as their notions of duty ; 
 like Overbury's Pedant, they " dare not 
 think a thought that the nominative 
 case governs not the verb ; " their theo- 
 logy may be as narrow as their philology ; 
 
20 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 they have little primnesses that make us 
 smile : but they have the hearts of hero- 
 ines. Pitifully paid, often with others to 
 support, often subject to ignorant and 
 wrong-headed committees, and obliged 
 against every instinct to adopt new 
 methods when education is periodically 
 overhauled, often with little physical 
 health, and living on courage and " wire," 
 with few social diversions higher than 
 the Sunday School picnic, and few hopes 
 of rest in this world higher than the Home 
 for Aged Women, they are at their posts 
 day by day, week by week, year by year, 
 because they are, as Milton said of 
 Cromwell, 
 
 " Guided by faith and matchless fortitude." 
 What is more inspiring than the men and 
 women who are " there," and "there" 
 not in the high and ambitious moments 
 of life, but on the obscure dead levels 
 that take the heart out of any one 
 who does not see the glory of common 
 things ? 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 21 
 
 These schoolmistresses, though they 
 may not know it, illustrate the absolute 
 necessity of routine for steadily effective 
 living. In little things they may show 
 the hard and wooden quality of a mind 
 that works in the treadmill day after 
 day, and may thus give a handle to those 
 critics who scoff at routine ; but if their 
 small accuracies seem pretentiously lit- 
 tle, their devotion is unpretentiously 
 great. Through habit, supported by un- 
 yielding conscience, they have forced 
 upon themselves a routine without which 
 they could not live. 
 
 A boy when he meets with loss or 
 grief or disaster, or even when he feels 
 the excitement of joyful expectation, is 
 likely to stop work altogether. He has 
 " no heart for it," he says ; he " cannot 
 do it." A young man crossed in love, a 
 young woman who loses father, mother, 
 or bosom friend — these may pine and 
 fret, and suffer the sorrow for days, or 
 weeks, or months, to stop their lives, 
 
22 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 may cease to live except as burdens to 
 themselves and others ; but, young or 
 old, a trained man or woman whose 
 heart and will are strong keeps on. 
 There is always somebody or something 
 to work for ; and while there is, life must 
 be, and shall become, worth living. " In 
 summer or winter/' said the proud ad- 
 vertisement of an old steamboat line, 
 " In summer or winter, in storm or calm, 
 the Commonwealth and the Plymouth 
 Rock invariably make the passage;" 
 and this should be the truth about you 
 and me. 
 
 The use of routine to make a sad life 
 endurable was once brought clearly be- 
 fore my mind as I watched the polar 
 bears in the Zoological Garden at Cen- 
 tral Park. In a kind of grotto cut in a 
 hillside, two polar bears were caged. 
 Two sides of the cage were of sheer 
 rock ; two were of iron, one separating 
 the polar bears from the grizzly bears, 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 23 
 
 and one separating them from the spec- 
 tators in the Park. The floor of the 
 grotto between the steep rock and the 
 pool of water which represented the Arc- 
 tic Ocean was narrow ; but on it one of 
 the bears was exercising with a rhythmic 
 motion strange and inexpressibly sad. 
 He moved from the centre of the grotto 
 two or three steps toward the rock, 
 swung his head wide and low three 
 times to the right and three times to the 
 left, with a sweep like that of a scythe, 
 stepped back two or three paces, com- 
 pleting a sort of ellipse, stepped forward 
 again, swung his head right and left 
 again three times, precisely as before, — 
 then back, then forward, then swinging, 
 on and on and on. At intervals, whether 
 with numerical precision or not I cannot 
 say, he broke his circuit, walked to the 
 iron fence between him and the grizzly 
 bears, walked back, and began once 
 more the round of motions devised, as it 
 seemed, to save him from madness or 
 
24 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 from death. Three times that day I vis- 
 ited him ; and always I found him at his 
 self - appointed task, — forward, swing, 
 back, forward, swing, back, on and on 
 and on. The rocky bottom of his den 
 was worn into holes where, always in the 
 same spots, he set his feet in this forlorn 
 attempt to put a saving routine into a 
 hopeless life. Near him, in a narrow 
 house with a little window-like door, a 
 small brown bear moved round and 
 round, casting one quick, sharp glance 
 at the outer world in every round, as he 
 walked briskly by the door; and in a 
 neighboring house a hyena strode angrily 
 back and forth, and back and forth, and 
 back and forth again. Here were captive 
 animals finding in routine the nearest 
 possible approach to an enrichment of 
 their lives. 
 
 The reaction against routine in mod- 
 ern education, the notion that children 
 should be pleased with a variety of sub- 
 jects made easy and interesting, rather 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 25 
 
 than drilled in a few, and roused to in- 
 terest themselves in these few and in 
 the thoroughness that drill demands, ac- 
 counts, I believe, in large measure for 
 the collapse of many a student's will be- 
 fore any subject that requires hard math- 
 ematical thinking. In Harvard College 
 an elementary course in philosophy used 
 to begin with lectures on psychology, 
 which fascinated the class ; but " oh, 
 the heavy change " when in the second 
 half-year psychology gave place to logic! 
 The text -book, "Jevons's Elementary 
 Lessons," is so simple that any youth of 
 fair intelligence who will come to close 
 quarters with it should master it with ease ; 
 yet more than one student, apparently in 
 full health and intelligence, declared that 
 he could make nothing of it, that it was 
 too hard for him altogether. He asked 
 to leave the course, to count the first half 
 of it toward his degree, and to take up 
 something more congenial. These boys, 
 through the labor-saving appliances of 
 
26 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 their schools, supplemented by their 
 choice of lecture courses in college, had 
 lost, or what is almost as bad, thought 
 they had lost, the power of close logical 
 application. Worst of all, they had lost 
 the stimulus of surmounting difficulties. 
 How were they training themselves to 
 be "there"? 
 
 I constantly meet students who declare 
 that they cannot learn geometry. This 
 commonly means that they hate geome- 
 try so cordially as never to give it their 
 close attention. There may be some in- 
 telligent persons who cannot learn geo- 
 metry ; but the vast majority of those 
 who think they cannot learn it, learn it 
 if they have to. 
 
 " I hold very strongly," says Cardinal 
 Newman, " that the first step in intellec- 
 tual training is to impress upon a boy's 
 mind the idea of science, method, order, 
 principle, and system ; of rule and excep- 
 tion, of richness and harmony. This is 
 commonly and excellently done by mak- 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 27 
 
 ing him begin with Grammar ; nor can 
 too great accuracy, or minuteness and 
 subtlety of teaching be used towards him, 
 as his faculties expand, with this simple 
 purpose. Hence it is that critical scholar- 
 ship is so important a discipline for him 
 when he is leaving school for the Uni- 
 versity. A second science is the Mathe- 
 matics : this should follow Grammar, still 
 with the same object, viz., to give him a 
 conception of development and arrange- 
 ment from and around a common centre. 
 Hence it is that Chronology and Geo- 
 graphy are so necessary for him, when 
 he reads History, which is otherwise lit- 
 tle better than a story-book. Hence, too, 
 Metrical Composition, when he reads 
 Poetry ; in order to stimulate his powers 
 into action in every practicable way, and 
 to prevent a merely passive reception of 
 images and ideas which in that case are 
 likely to pass out of the mind as soon as 
 they have entered it. Let him once gain 
 this habit of method, of starting from 
 
28 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 fixed points, of making his ground good 
 as he goes, of distinguishing what he 
 knows from what he does not know, and 
 I conceive he will be gradually initiated 
 into the largest and truest philosophical 
 views, and will feel nothing but impa- 
 tience and disgust at the random theories 
 and imposing sophistries and dashing 
 paradoxes, which carry away half-formed 
 and superficial intellects." 
 
 The child who learns to do small things 
 well when he is small gets the best train- 
 ing for doing big things well when he is 
 big. He lifts the calf every day; and 
 behold, he has lifted the cow ! Wherever 
 you go, you meet, not merely people who 
 scamp their work, but people who do not 
 know the difference between a good job 
 and a bad one. " My great difficulty," 
 says the master of a large private school, 
 " is to find teachers who know anything, 
 or who seem as if they had ever seen 
 anybody that knew anything. They have 
 plenty of * educational progress ' and 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 29 
 
 ' educational theory ; ' but they don't 
 know anything." After all, why should 
 they know anything ? They have a good 
 deal of more or less accurate information, 
 such as people get who have studied what 
 came easiest and seemed at the time most 
 interesting, and have let the rest go. 
 Then, with a little pedagogy superadded, 
 they have been turned loose to hand 
 down their principles to others. " The 
 Austrian ballet" [Australian ballot], a 
 New York schoolgirl wrote in an exam- 
 ination book, " was introduced into this 
 country by Cleveland to corrupt the peo- 
 ple and keep it secret." The state of mind 
 evinced by this sentence has been too 
 common in school children under any 
 system of learning ; but I believe we do 
 less to clear it now than when we paid 
 more attention to those fundamental 
 principles which tend to promote accu- 
 racy in thought and in expression. 
 
 I have said elsewhere — and I believe 
 it with all my might — that one reason 
 
30 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 for the hold of athletic sport on our 
 schools and colleges is its awakening in 
 many boys their first, or almost their 
 first, ambition to do something as well 
 as it can be done, and the recognition of 
 severe routine as a means to that end. 
 In football they are judged by an in- 
 numerable jury of their peers. Failure 
 is public disgrace ; success, if decently 
 bought, is glory. " Jack," said a great 
 football player to a shiftless student 
 whom he was trying to look after mor- 
 ally, " did you ever do anything as well 
 as you could ? " " No, Tom," said the 
 other, " I don't believe I ever did." The 
 amateur athlete is held up to his best 
 by the immediate, certain, and wide- 
 spread fame of good playing, and the 
 equally prompt and notorious shame of 
 bad playing. He is held up, further, by 
 the conviction that what he is doing is 
 for his college or for his school. Never 
 again, unless he holds public office, will 
 such a searchlight be turned on him ; 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 31 
 
 and never again will so many persons 
 see what he does or fails to do. As a re- 
 sult, a thoroughly trained football player, 
 meeting the supreme test, may find him- 
 self lifted up by the inspiration of the 
 moment, of the crowd, of the cheering, 
 and of college patriotism, so that — as 
 some one has put it — he plays better 
 than he knows how. In a few instances 
 every man in a team plays better than 
 he knows how. 
 
 Older people can hardly appreciate 
 the stimulus to every power of mind and 
 body in a great athletic contest. Here 
 is work in which youth itself is an ad- 
 vantage, in which the highest honor 
 may be won by a young man who has 
 missed all earlier opportunities for doing 
 anything as well as he knew how ; here 
 is a fresh chance to show of what stuff 
 — mental and physical — he is made, 
 and a cause that appeals to youth so 
 strongly as to make obstacles springs of 
 courage. Here is something that rouses 
 
32 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 a young man's powers as the elective 
 system in study is designed to do, yet 
 does not require that basis of intellectual 
 accuracy which is essential to success in 
 study. Here, also, is something in which 
 a young man who can succeed knows 
 that success may mean an opening for 
 the work of his life. Thousands of men 
 actually see his success with their own 
 eyes ; thousands more hear of it. If on 
 graduation he applies for work, he is 
 not the unknown quantity that a young 
 graduate usually is. He has already 
 been tried in times of stress and found 
 not wanting. If, as sometimes happens, 
 he has shown, not merely that he is al- 
 ways to be counted on, but that in the 
 thick of things he is inspired and inspir- 
 ing, he has marked himself as a leader 
 of men. Besides, no man can thoroughly 
 succeed in football who plays for himself 
 alone. There are few more searching 
 tests of men's motives and spirit. This is 
 why class officers chosen from football 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 33 
 
 players are almost invariably good men. 
 On the gridiron field their classmates 
 learn who have self-control, courage, en- 
 durance, minds quick in emergencies, 
 devotion to class and college, and who 
 play to the grand stand, and unless they 
 can be spectacular are of no use. 
 
 I dwell on football because its hold on 
 a college is often misunderstood by per- 
 sons who think of it merely as a brutal, 
 tricky, and sadly exaggerated pastime, 
 and not, in spite of its evils, as a test of 
 generalship, physical and moral prow- 
 ess, quickness of body and mind ; and 
 because it is a good illustration of a vis- 
 ible and practical purpose (crossing the 
 enemy's goal line) fired by an ideal (the 
 honor and glory of a college). The full 
 strength of college feeling does not come 
 to a man until years after his gradua- 
 tion ; but he knows something of it when 
 he " lines up " beside his old school en- 
 emy against an old school friend, who, 
 at the parting of the ways, has chosen 
 
34 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 another Alma Mater. As years go by, 
 his love of college becomes second only 
 to his love of country. The college be- 
 comes more and more a human being, 
 for whom it is an honor to work, to live, 
 and to die. Indeed, every man who has 
 once taken her name is in some sense 
 bound to work, to live, and to die for 
 her. In business, in politics, in religion, 
 in everything, it is she who cheers him, 
 as he struggles to hold his standard 
 high. Much modern teaching dwells on 
 the development of self ; yet he who de- 
 votes himself to the rounding out of his 
 own powers may be good for nothing, 
 whereas he who devotes himself to what 
 he loves better than himself, and thus 
 abandons much that looks good for him 
 because he must do something else with 
 his whole heart, — must do it often in a 
 romantic and what may seem a reckless 
 loyalty, — such a man achieves a power 
 beyond the reach of the professional self- 
 developer. Education is not in a high 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 35 
 
 sense practical unless it has an ideal in 
 it and round about it. I know the com- 
 mon talk that colleges unfit their stu- 
 dents for those daily duties which might 
 chafe a j mind that has tasted intellectual 
 joy. No college can make everybody 
 unselfish and wise ; yet among human 
 powers for unselfishness and wisdom I 
 know none like that of a healthy college. 
 If by a practical life we mean such a 
 life of service as is not merely endured 
 but enjoyed, lived with enthusiasm, then 
 surely the most unpractical people in the 
 world are the men and women who put 
 away their ideals as childish things. 
 " The light of a whole life dies 
 When love is done," 
 
 a poet says ; and though he means the 
 love between man and woman, his verse 
 would be more deeply true if "love" 
 might take on the wider meaning of 
 that faith and energy and courage and 
 enthusiasm which light the dim and tor- 
 tuous way. With this, no life while sense 
 
36 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 remains can be crushed by drudgery or 
 woe. Without it, a life of drudgery is a 
 life of Egyptian darkness. " Where there 
 is no vision the people perish." 
 
 The college helps her sons and daugh- 
 ters to keep alive the vision. She dif- 
 fuses about them what Mr. Justice 
 Holmes has called "an aroma of high 
 feeling, not to be found or lost in science 
 or Greek, — not to be fixed, yet all-per- 
 vading.' ' She shows, in steady bright- 
 ness to the best, in flashing glimpses to 
 the worst, the vision without which there 
 is no life. She teaches her children not 
 to shun drudgery but to do the work, 
 and in doing it to know its higher end. 
 The question whether a thing is ever- 
 lasting truth or commonplace is often 
 a question whether it has or has not a 
 light in it. Homer, even when he tells 
 us how Telemachus put on his clothes, 
 is not commonplace. " I suppose," says 
 Ruskin, " the passage in the Iliad which 
 on the whole has excited most admira- 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 37 
 
 tion is that which describes a wife's sor- 
 row at parting from her husband, and a 
 child's fright at its father's helmet." It 
 is education that helps us see, as Homer 
 saw, the high meaning of the common- 
 place in every part of life, the beauty 
 whereby the drudgery of daily life be- 
 comes transfigured. It is education that 
 teaches us not to measure the best things 
 in the world by money. It is educated 
 men and women, beyond all others, who 
 throw into their work that eager sacri- 
 fice of love for which no money can pay, 
 and to which, when work cries out to 
 be done, no task is too forbidding, no 
 hours are too long. The practical life is 
 the life of steady, persistent, intelligent, 
 courageous work, widening its horizon 
 as the worker grows in knowledge, and, 
 by doing well what lies before him, fits 
 himself for harder and higher tasks. But 
 the practical life of educated men and 
 women is, or should be, even more than 
 this. It makes, or should make, every 
 
38 ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 task the expression of an enlightened 
 spirit. There were in the nineteenth 
 century few lives more practical than 
 those of the " heroic boys " who, in the 
 exquisite words of their old comrade, 
 "gave freely and eagerly all that they 
 had or hoped for to their country and 
 to their fellow-men in the hour of great 
 need." In such a practical life as every 
 man or woman ought to lead, such a 
 practical life as educated men and wo- 
 men are bound to lead or be false to 
 their trust, it is the vision that abides 
 and commands. 
 
HARVARD AND THE 
 INDIVIDUAL 
 
HARVARD AND THE 
 INDIVIDUAL 
 
 For such intercollegiate discussion as 
 takes the form of " symposia " in Sunday 
 papers, the relative merit of large and 
 small colleges is a never-failing topic; 
 and in this discussion some officers of 
 the smaller colleges maintain that a col- 
 lege is the better for being small. With- 
 out inquiring whether these gentlemen 
 would reject opportunities of growth for 
 their own colleges, whether the system 
 of admission by certificate is not chiefly 
 a bid for students, and whether the very 
 pleas for the small college are not de- 
 signed to make it larger, I pass at once 
 to the strongest argument of the small 
 college — the argument that in it every- 
 body knows everybody else, and that 
 
42 HARVARD AND 
 
 consequently, while the whole commu- 
 nity may move as one man, the individ- 
 ual is never ignored. In a large college, 
 these gentlemen contend, concerted ac- 
 tion is impossible ; and the individual 
 with no strong social claim is lost in the 
 crowd. Near a whole city full, home he 
 has none. If he is poor, he may starve ; 
 if he is morbid, he may go mad ; if he 
 is sick, he may die — and no one of his 
 fellows knows till all is over. If he is 
 eccentric, he may be " queered," as it is 
 called, growing queerer and queerer un- 
 til an eccentricity which might be modi- 
 fied into effective individuality has be- 
 come a hopeless inability to get on with 
 men. In a small college the student who 
 would be a recluse is literally dragged 
 out of his den to see football — or even 
 to play it — and is humanized thereby. 
 At a large college nobody need know 
 or care whether any one sees a game of 
 football or not. There are enough with- 
 out him. If he chooses to " flock by 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 43 
 
 himself," he may do so till he is at cross 
 purposes with his own youth and with 
 every natural manifestation of youth in 
 others. Yet the spirit that brings all the 
 students of a college together for a com- 
 mon purpose, the undivided enthusiasm 
 of a whole college, is one of the precious 
 experiences of education ; for even when 
 to middle-aged people the cause seems 
 trivial, the spirit is patriotism, the same 
 patriotism that in a national crisis 
 " Shall nerve heroic boys 
 To hazard all in Freedom's fight." 
 
 That even a large college may be 
 roused as one man is obvious to any- 
 body who has heard (I use the word ad- 
 visedly) a game of baseball at Princeton, 
 or who has known athletics at Yale, or 
 who knew Harvard in the football sea- 
 son of 1 90 1. Princeton, situated in a 
 small town on an isolated hill, is a cen- 
 tre to itself. Yale lived long in and 
 about a crowded campus, and is so far 
 from a great city that even on Saturdays 
 
44 HARVARD AND 
 
 and Sundays the students naturally stay 
 at the college. At Yale, moreover, as at 
 Princeton, the elective system was for 
 many years applied so sparingly that 
 the students felt the sympathy which 
 comes of common tasks; and even if 
 now and then this union, like some 
 others, was a union for the avoidance of 
 labor, it could not but prove a strong 
 bond. Harvard, on the contrary, seems 
 at first sight to have every requisite for 
 disintegration : she lives close to a large 
 city, full of social distractions ; she has 
 hundreds of students from Boston and 
 the suburbs who may go and come 
 every day ; her recitation halls, her labo- 
 ratories, and even her dormitories are 
 often far apart. Moreover her elective 
 system is so free that even at the outset 
 it breaks up the classes ; and not only 
 Jones and Smith, but Jones and John- 
 son, whose alphabetical destiny would 
 seem to unite them, may go through 
 four years without knowing each other 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 45 
 
 by sight or even being in the same lec- 
 ture room at the same time. In such a 
 university, it is urged, all common feel- 
 ing must be factitious — " pumped," like 
 that organized cheering when nobody is 
 cheerful, but everybody is trying to 
 "support" his team and "rattle" the 
 other one. In organized cheering, it is 
 urged, and in that only, Jones and John- 
 son have a common emotional experi- 
 ence, but they have it anonymously. 
 
 A story told by Professor Palmer and 
 afterward printed by Mr. E. S. Martin 
 reveals the divided interests of Harvard. 
 On the evening of a mass meeting in 
 Massachusetts Hall for the discussion 
 of some point in the athletic relations 
 between Harvard and Yale, Professor 
 Palmer went to Sever Hall, where Mr. 
 David A. Wells was to lecture on bank- 
 ing ; and as he went he was troubled by 
 the thought that " those boys " would all 
 be in Massachusetts Hall, and that Mr. 
 Wells would have no audience. Arriving 
 
46 HARVARD AND 
 
 at the lecture hall, which seats over four 
 hundred persons, he found standing-room 
 only ; and it was not Cambridge women 
 that filled the seats — it was Harvard 
 students. After the lecture, remember- 
 ing that there should be that evening 
 a meeting of the Classical Club, he went 
 to the top of Stoughton Hall to find there 
 between twenty and thirty men, who, 
 oblivious alike of banking and of Yale, 
 had spent the evening in a discussion of 
 Homeric philology. " Harvard indiffer- 
 ence," says one critic ; " Harvard Uni- 
 versity," says another. Much of the 
 strength of Harvard lies in her diversity 
 of interests. Side by side with the boys 
 whose passion is football are the men 
 whose passion is mathematics or philo- 
 sophy, who care nothing for intercolle- 
 giate politics and less than nothing for 
 intercollegiate athletics ; and such is the 
 freedom of Harvard that these men are 
 suffered to follow their own bent, and 
 are not forced into a life with which they 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 47 
 
 have no sympathy. To one who has lived 
 in Harvard College it is the college of all 
 colleges for the recognition of individual 
 needs and individual rights ; of the in- 
 evitable and delightful variety in talent 
 and temperament, and even in enthu- 
 siasm. When all the people in one place 
 are interested in one thing, it may be 
 inspiration, and it may be provinciality. 
 When everybody in a university shouts 
 at every ball game, athletics prosper, but 
 culture pines. Where Greek and the 
 chapel are elective, baseball should not 
 be prescribed ; and where baseball is not 
 prescribed, there are sure to be individ- 
 uals who cannot always occupy either 
 the diamond or the bleachers. 
 
 "We grant," it may be said, " that Har- 
 vard allows and encourages a man to lead 
 an independent intellectual life, to get all 
 the Greek he wants, and all the chemis- 
 try he wants — and no more ; but what 
 of human fellowship, the real and great 
 and permanent blessing of college life ? " 
 
48 HARVARD AND 
 
 The answer of any one who knows the 
 College is this : if a man is interested in 
 anything outside of himself, he will get 
 human fellowship in Cambridge ; if he 
 is not, he will not get it anywhere. The 
 best friendships, as divers wise men have 
 told us, are based on common interest in 
 work. Editors of a college paper, debat- 
 ers in a college team, students working 
 side by side in a laboratory — or even in 
 athletics, now that athletics have ceased 
 to be play — these men, and not the fel- 
 low poker-players, are laying the founda- 
 tion of permanent friendship. Harvard 
 College contains hundreds of groups of 
 men who come together for work which 
 they do for the love of it ; and in some 
 one of these an earnest man is sure to 
 find or make his friends. Is it better to 
 know everybody in a class of fifty or fifty 
 in a class of five hundred ? Which offers 
 the more reasonable and promising basis 
 for the friendship of a life ? Is there not, 
 after all, some danger when even afnni- 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 49 
 
 ties are, as it were, prescribed and pro- 
 vincial — some danger in that extem- 
 pore intimacy, that almost instantaneous 
 swearing of eternal friendship, which a 
 small community may demand ? 
 
 " But what of the relation between stu- 
 dent and instructor ? " In a small college 
 the Faculty know, or think they know, 
 every student. Between the large college 
 and the small there is a real difference in 
 the relation of the instructors as a whole 
 toward the students as individuals, and 
 in the relation of the students as a whole 
 toward the instructors as individuals. In 
 Harvard University are over three hun- 
 dred professors, instructors, and assist- 
 ants under the Faculty of Arts and Sci- 
 ences alone, of whom more than a third 
 are members of that Faculty appointed 
 either for a term of years or without 
 limit of time. No teacher knows by sight 
 every other teacher ; still less does any 
 teacher know every student. Yet many 
 teachers know more students than they 
 
50 HARVARD AND 
 
 would or could know in a small college ; 
 and every student is known by several 
 teachers besides his Freshman " adviser." 
 Even the large lecture courses are so 
 combined with laboratory work or con- 
 ferences or excursions that the students 
 in them are brought into contact with 
 the younger teachers if not with the older 
 ones. There is, I believe, no college in 
 which the relation between instructor 
 and pupil is more delightful. The ma- 
 turer students are frequently consulted 
 in matters of general importance and 
 frequently called upon to help other stu- 
 dents who need the strength that comes 
 from strong friends. Many instructors 
 invite students to their houses, or keep 
 certain hours clear, as the University 
 preachers do, for any and all students. 
 Every Christmas Eve Professor Norton 
 opens his fine old house at Shady Hill 
 to all members of the University who are 
 away from home. Some young men, it is 
 said, stay away from home a day longer 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 51 
 
 to meet Professor Norton thus ; and their 
 host would forgive them if he could know 
 the charm of an evening with him. 
 
 Within a few years the wives of cer- 
 tain University officers have instituted 
 a series of afternoon teas on Fridays 
 between Thanksgiving and the first of 
 March, and have invited all members 
 of the University. The teas, on which 
 students at first looked sceptically if not 
 scornfully, are now fairly established. 
 They have done much in giving new- 
 comers what they sadly need — the so- 
 ciety of refined women — and in giving 
 all students opportunities of meeting 
 persons whom it is a privilege to know. 
 The room used for the teas is the large 
 parlor of Phillips Brooks House ; the rug 
 in the centre was Bishop Brooks's own ; 
 and the bust in the adjoining hall, with 
 the tablet beside it, leads men's thoughts 
 to him for whom the house was named, 
 and in whose honor it was dedicated to 
 hospitality as well as to piety. 
 
52 HARVARD AND 
 
 The homesick Freshman from a dis- 
 tant State finds at Cambridge a better 
 welcome than he expects, though no 
 kindness can at once and forever anni- 
 hilate homesickness. Some years ago a 
 well-known professor, walking through 
 the College Yard at the beginning of 
 the autumn term, met a young man 
 whose aspect prompted him to say : "Are 
 you looking for anybody ? " The young 
 man answered : " I don't know anybody 
 this side of the Rocky Mountains." Of 
 what immediately followed I know no- 
 thing, but can guess much. Of one 
 thing I am sure, — the young man is 
 to-day a loyal graduate of Harvard 
 College. Nowadays the newly arrived 
 student finds waiting for him, even be- 
 fore he meets his " adviser," a committee 
 of instructors and undergraduates whose 
 business and whose pleasure it is to help 
 him adjust himself to his new surround- 
 ings. Nor has he been long at the Uni- 
 versity before he is invited to the room 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 53 
 
 of a Junior or a Senior, to meet there a 
 few members of his own class, as well as 
 members of other classes. There he and 
 his classmates are entertained by the 
 older men, who often give them serious 
 and sensible advice ; and there they are 
 made to feel that they are "taken into 
 the team." "Entertained," I said, — not 
 hazed, as of old ; and though the decline 
 and fall of hazing may cut off Fresh- 
 men from the instantaneous friendships 
 of cooperative self-defence, few will re- 
 gard it as a mark of degeneration. To at 
 least one of these entertainments every 
 Freshman is invited; for the large com- 
 mittee of Seniors and Juniors in charge 
 assigns each Freshman to some one man. 
 Freshmen are invited, also, by their class 
 president to social evening meetings, for 
 which purpose, since scarcely any room 
 can hold them all, the class is sometimes 
 divided into squads of fifty or sixty. 
 Again, in the new Harvard Union, 
 which, like so much else, the University 
 
54 HARVARD AND 
 
 owes to Mr. Henry L. Higginson, the 
 newcomer finds countless opportunities 
 of scraping acquaintance with his fel- 
 lows. 
 
 Probably the sick student is better and 
 more promptly cared for at Harvard 
 than at any other university in the world. 
 Here, as elsewhere, a taciturn and cour- 
 ageous person may bear much pain and 
 disease without revealing his bodily 
 state to a physician ; but nowhere is such 
 conduct less necessary and less excusa- 
 ble. Every student not well enough to 
 attend College exercises need only send 
 word to the Medical Visitor, who will 
 come at once to his room and tell him 
 what to do. If the case is simple, the 
 Medical Visitor gives advice and, it may 
 be, a prescription ; if it requires pro- 
 longed medical attendance, he sends for 
 any physician that the student may 
 name. He himself keeps fixed office 
 hours in the College Yard for consulta- 
 tion with such students as need him ; nor 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 55 
 
 does he receive pay for any part of his 
 work as Medical Visitor beyond his sal- 
 ary from the University. The prompt- 
 ness and the devotion of this officer 
 reduce to a minimum the danger of con- 
 tagion from epidemics. For the care of 
 the sick, the Stillman Infirmary has al- 
 ready a nearly perfect equipment; and 
 the new ward for contagious diseases 
 will make the Infirmary complete. 
 
 As to moral aid for the individual stu- 
 dents, no one who is not inside of Har- 
 vard life can begin to know how many 
 young fellows are aiding the weaker 
 brethren to lead clean, sober, and hon- 
 est lives ; how much responsibility of 
 all sorts the best students will take, 
 not merely for their personal friends but 
 for anybody that they can help. Some 
 years ago a young man of strange and 
 forbidding character was seen running 
 round and round on a Cambridge side- 
 walk, imagining that he was Adam 
 flying from temptation ; and though ob- 
 
$6 HARVARD AND 
 
 viously insane he was put into the sta- 
 tion-house. The case was made known 
 to a student who as a child had attended 
 the same school. He had never known 
 the sick man much, and had never known 
 good of him ; yet he got his release 
 from the station-house, promising to be 
 responsible for him through the night. 
 With the aid of a fellow student he took 
 into his own rooms the insane man, and 
 gave him the bedroom. He himself with 
 his friend sat up all night in the adjoin- 
 ing study. Into this study the madman 
 would issue from time to time, making 
 night hideous to the two watchers ; but 
 they did not lose patience. In the morn- 
 ing the student in charge secured a phy- 
 sician, assumed the responsibility of a 
 guardian, drove with the sick man to 
 the nearest asylum, advanced money (of 
 which he was notoriously short) for ne- 
 cessary expenses, and then, exhausted, 
 hastened to New York to meet his fel- 
 low members of the Hasty Pudding Club 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 57 
 
 (who had started, I believe, the night 
 before) and appeared as a smiling star 
 in the performance for which he had 
 been so strangely prepared. No casual 
 observer would have dreamed that in 
 this apparently thoughtless person were 
 the quick courage and devotion which 
 made inevitable the acceptance of a 
 revolting service for a youth who was 
 almost an outcast. 
 
 The University is a little world with 
 all the varied enthusiasms of athletic, in- 
 tellectual, social, and moral life ; and in 
 spite of the temptation here as in other 
 worlds, little or big, for men to break 
 up into small and exclusive groups, the 
 number of students who have with their 
 fellows an acquaintance wide and varied 
 is exceedingly large. Our wiser students 
 recognize the truth of the late Lord 
 Dundreary's famous proverb, "Birds of 
 a feather gather no moss," and act ac- 
 cordingly. Moreover there are few com- 
 munities, if any, in which a man may 
 
58 HARVARD AND 
 
 stand more firmly on what he himself is 
 and does, trusting to be judged thereby. 
 I doubt whether any student within my 
 memory was ever more warmly admired 
 and loved than Marshall Newell, a farmer 
 boy. He was, it is true, an athlete, " an 
 athlete sturdy, alert, and brave." Ath- 
 letics made him widely known ; what 
 made him widely loved was not athletics 
 but the strong, healthy, simple, and fear- 
 less heart which revealed itself in his 
 athletics as in everything else about 
 him ; and when he died one of the social 
 leaders of his college days said sincerely 
 that it was worth while to spend four 
 years in Harvard College, merely to have 
 known such a man as he. 
 
 Not many years ago a big country 
 boy named Adelbert Shaw entered Har- 
 vard College as a special student. He 
 had been fitting himself for Wesleyan 
 University, and had changed his plans 
 so suddenly that he could not take all 
 the Harvard examinations for regular 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 59 
 
 standing. On his arrival he knew but 
 one or two persons in the University. 
 He had little capital besides a strong 
 body and mind, an unmistakable good 
 nature, a big earnestness, and an unu- 
 sual aptitude for turning from one kind 
 of work to another with equal devotion 
 to each and no waste of power in the 
 transition. On the football field he made 
 people laugh by his awkwardness and 
 by the beaming good humor with which 
 he hurled himself into the scrimmage ; 
 in the classroom he was as earnest as 
 on the ball field ; in his own room, not- 
 withstanding his sudden and universal 
 popularity, he worked hard, and in study 
 hours kept his door closed to all but the 
 few that he knew best. He was not a 
 great athlete, though he might have be- 
 come one. He played in the Freshman 
 football team, was a substitute in the 
 University football squad, and later ap- 
 peared as a candidate for the University 
 crew. In the spring of his first year at 
 
60 HARVARD AND 
 
 Cambridge, he was thrown out of a sin- 
 gle shell and was drowned. His body 
 was sent home ; but after it had gone, 
 a service was held in Appleton Chapel, 
 which contained that day more students 
 than I have ever seen in it before or 
 since. In Holden Chapel the athletes 
 had a service of their own ; and the stu- 
 dent who took charge of it could scarcely 
 speak. Shaw was a religious man, ear- 
 nest in religion as in all things ; yet he 
 was never praised more highly than by 
 a student who was known as a cynic. 
 In a few months this unknown coun- 
 try boy had won the respect and the 
 affection of the College that some still 
 call indifferent, undemocratic, an aristo- 
 cracy of Boston society and New York 
 wealth. 
 
 If a youth makes no friends in Cam- 
 bridge, it is stupendously his own fault. 
 I do not say that it is impossible for 
 a Harvard student to go off by him- 
 self, dig a hole, lie down in it, and stay 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 61 
 
 there — as he might not be able to do at 
 a small college ; I do say that those who 
 affirm Harvard to be undemocratic or 
 to value men for their money are either 
 misinformed or defamatory. I could 
 name plenty of men whom heaps of 
 money did not save from social fail- 
 ure in Harvard College ; and even more 
 whom narrow means and want of fam- 
 ily connection did not cut off from al- 
 most universal popularity. Students at 
 Harvard, like students elsewhere — like 
 all men, young or old — may misjudge 
 their fellows, and, misjudging them, may 
 use them cruelly. Yet even in such cases 
 most of the blame belongs commonly to 
 the misjudged man. The student who 
 bears himself well and does something for 
 his class or his College is sure eventually 
 to succeed. In the Freshman year a few 
 prizes may be given to attractive loaf- 
 ers; but in the long run the Harvard 
 public insists on some form of achieve- 
 ment. No individual who does anything 
 
62 HARVARD 
 
 worth doing, and does it with all his 
 might, need be lost in the crowd at Har- 
 vard ; and, taken for all in all, Harvard 
 is the best place I know for the indi- 
 vidual youth. 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 CHILDREN OF CONCORD 
 
ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 CHILDREN OF CONCORD, MAS- 
 SACHUSETTS, ON THE ONE 
 HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY 
 OF THE BIRTH OF EMERSON, 
 MAY 25, 1903. 
 
 Now and then we meet a man who seems 
 to live high above the little things that 
 vex our lives, and who makes us forget 
 them. He may speak or he may be si- 
 lent ; it is enough that he lives and that 
 we are with him. When we face him, we 
 feel somewhat as we feel when we first 
 see the ocean, or Niagara, or the Alps, 
 or Athens, or when we first read the 
 greatest poetry. Nothing, indeed, is more 
 like great poetry than the soul of a great 
 man ; and when the great man is good, 
 when he loves everything that is beauti- 
 ful and true and makes his life like what 
 
66 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 he loves, his face becomes transfigured, 
 or, as an old poet used to say, " through- 
 shine;" for the soul within him is the 
 light of the world. 
 
 Such a great man was Emerson. He 
 was much beside : he was a philosopher. 
 Sometimes a philosopher is a man who 
 disbelieves everything worth believing, 
 and spends a great deal of strength in 
 making simple things hard ; but Emer- 
 son was a philosopher in the best sense 
 of the word, — a lover of wisdom and of 
 truth. He was also a poet ; not a poet 
 like Homer who sang, but a poet like 
 that Greek philosopher, Plato, who 
 thought deep and high, and saw what 
 no one else saw, and told what he saw 
 as no one else could tell it. This is an- 
 other way of saying that Emerson was 
 a " seer." 
 
 To many of you he may not seem a 
 poet, for his verse is often homely and 
 rough. It has lines and stanzas of noble 
 music, — 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 67 
 
 " Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old." 
 
 " Still on the seeds of all he made 
 The rose of beauty burns. 
 Through times that wear and forms that fade 
 Immortal youth returns ; " 
 
 but seldom many of them in succession. 
 
 " Though love repine and reason chafe, 
 
 There came a voice without reply, — 
 ' 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 
 
 When for the truth he ought to die.' " 
 
 The first three of these lines are beyond 
 the reach of most poets ; the fourth line 
 is prose. 
 
 " I am born a poet," he wrote to his 
 betrothed ; " of a low class without doubt, 
 yet a poet. That is my nature and voca- 
 tion. My singing, be sure, is very husky, 
 and is, for the most part, in prose." " He 
 lamented his hard fate," says his bio- 
 grapher, Mr. Cabot, " in being only half 
 a bard ; or, as he wrote to Carlyle, ' not a 
 poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, 
 and merely serving as writer, etc., in 
 
68 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 this empty America before the arrival of 
 the poets.' " He questioned whether to 
 print his poems, " uncertain always," he 
 wrote, " whether I have one true spark 
 of that fire which burns in verse ; " and 
 in a little poem, called "The Test," he 
 says that in some five hundred of his 
 verses 
 
 When he wrote prose, he thought of a 
 sentence by itself, and not of its connec- 
 tion with other sentences ; and when he 
 wrote verse, he thought, it would seem, 
 of the form of each line, without much 
 attention to the form or the length of its 
 neighbors, or even to its own smooth- 
 ness, — he whose ear for a prose sentence 
 was trained so delicately. 
 
 Yet I, for one, would give up any other 
 poetry of America rather than Emer- 
 son's ; and I am certain that one secret 
 of his power over men and women was 
 his belief that every human soul is poetry 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 69 
 
 and a poet, and his waking of men and 
 women to that belief. He had beyond 
 other men a poet's heart ; and if, as Car- 
 lyle says, to see deeply is to see music- 
 ally, and poetry is musical thought, he 
 is a poet of poets. 
 
 " God hid the whole world in thy heart," 
 
 says Emerson. " The poet," he says else- 
 where, " knows why the plain or meadow 
 of space was strown with these flowers 
 we call suns, and moons, and stars ; why 
 the great deep is adorned with animals, 
 with men and gods." 
 
 Nature he lived with ; and when he 
 wrote of her, he wrote as one who knew 
 her as his closest friend. "My book 
 should smell of pines," he said. 
 
 " To read the sense the woods impart 
 You must bring the throbbing heart." 
 
 " Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, 
 And merry is only a mask of sad, 
 But, sober on a fund of joy, 
 The woods at heart are glad." 
 
;o ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 " Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
 Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk ? 
 
 O be my friend, and teach me to be thine." 
 
 "Thou" [the poet], he said, "shalt 
 have the whole land for thy park and 
 manor, the sea for thy bath and naviga- 
 tion, without tax and without envy ; the 
 woods and the rivers thou shalt own ; 
 and thou shalt possess that wherein oth- 
 ers are only tenants and boarders. Thou 
 true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wher- 
 ever snow falls, or water flows, or birds 
 fly, wherever day and night meet in twi- 
 light, wherever the blue heaven is hung 
 by clouds or sown with stars, wherever 
 are forms with transparent boundaries, 
 wherever are outlets into celestial space, 
 wherever is danger and awe and love, 
 there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed 
 for thee ; and though thou shouldst walk 
 the world over, thou shalt not be able 
 to find a condition inopportune or ig- 
 noble." 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 71 
 
 The poet is not only a seer, he is a 
 hearer : — 
 
 " Let me go where'er I will 
 I hear a sky-born music still : 
 It sounds from all things old, 
 It sounds from all things young, 
 From all that 's fair, from all that 's foul, 
 Peals out a cheerful song. 
 It is not only in the rose, 
 It is not only in the bird, 
 Not only where the rainbow glows, 
 Nor in the song of woman heard, 
 But in the darkest, meanest things 
 There alway, alway something sings. 
 'T is not in the high stars alone, 
 Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
 Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone, 
 Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
 But in the mud and scum of things 
 There alway, alway something sings." 
 
 Yet it was not cheerfulness that made 
 Emerson a poet ; and certainly it was not 
 music, in the common understanding of 
 the term: it was high thought, joined 
 with a wonderful gift — an almost in- 
 spired sense — of the right word ; a gift 
 
72 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 not always his, but his so often that he 
 
 has said more memorable things than 
 
 any other American. You can find no 
 
 higher simplicity in the fitting of word to 
 
 thought : — 
 
 " Though love repine and reason chafe, 
 There came a voice without reply." 
 
 While I speak of the poetry in him 
 and the love of nature, let me read what 
 he wrote to a little girl of thirteen who 
 looked up to him then and always : — 
 
 My dear Lucia : — I am afraid you 
 think me very ungrateful for the good 
 letters which I begged for and which 
 are so long in coming to me, or that I 
 am malicious and mean to make you 
 wait as long for an answer ; but, to tell 
 you the truth, I have had so many " com- 
 position lessons " set me lately, that I am 
 sure that no scholar of Mr. Moore's has 
 had less spare time. Otherwise I should 
 have written instantly ; for I have an im- 
 mense curiosity for Plymouth news, and 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 73 
 
 have a great regard for my young cor- 
 respondent. I would gladly know what 
 books Lucia likes to read when nobody 
 advises her, and most of all what her 
 thoughts are when she walks alone or sits 
 alone. For, though I know that Lucia is 
 the happiest of girls in having in her sis- 
 ter so wise and kind a guide, yet even 
 her aid must stop when she has put the 
 book before you : neither sister nor bro- 
 ther nor mother nor father can think for 
 us : in the little private chapel of your 
 own mind none but God and you can 
 see the happy thoughts that follow each 
 other, the beautiful affections that spring 
 there, the little silent hymns that are sung 
 there at morning and at evening. And I 
 hope that every sun that shines, every star 
 that rises, every wind that blows upon 
 you will only bring you better thoughts 
 and sweeter music. Have you found out 
 that Nature is always talking to you, es- 
 pecially when you are alone, though she 
 has not the gift of articulate speech? 
 
74 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 Have you found out what that great gray- 
 old ocean that is always in your sight 
 says ? Listen. And what the withered 
 leaves that shiver and chatter in the cold 
 March wind ? Only listen. The Wind is 
 the poet of the World, and sometimes 
 he sings very pretty summer ballads, and 
 sometimes very terrible odes and dirges. 
 But if you will not tell me the little soli- 
 tary thoughts that I am asking for, what 
 Nature says to you, and what you say to 
 Nature, at least you can tell me about 
 your books, — what you like the least and 
 what the best, . . . the new studies, . . . 
 the drawing and the music and the 
 dancing, — and fail not to write to your 
 friend, 
 
 R. Waldo Emerson. 
 
 His " immense curiosity for Plymouth 
 news" is not surprising; for he wrote 
 this letter shortly before his marriage 
 with Miss Jackson, of Plymouth. The 
 " wise and kind " sister of his little cor- 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 75 
 
 respondent was Miss Jackson's closest 
 friend, and stood up with her at the 
 wedding. 
 
 Emerson was also a patriot, a man 
 who loved his country, and longed for it 
 to do right. " One thing," he says, " is 
 plain for all men of common sense and 
 common conscience, that here, here in 
 America is the home of man." " America 
 is a poem in our eyes ; " "its ample 
 geography dazzles the imagination, and 
 it will not wait long for metres." 
 
 " For He that flung the broad blue fold 
 O'ermantling land and sea, 
 One third part of the sky unrolled 
 For the banner of the free." 
 
 " For He that worketh high and wise 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man." 
 
 Yet his greatest patriotic poem is not 
 the Fourth of July Ode, from which I 
 have been quoting, — 
 
 (" O tenderly the haughty day 
 Fills his blue urn with fire,") 
 
76 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 and not the " Concord Hymn," never so 
 familiar that we can read without a 
 thrill, — 
 
 " Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
 And fired the shot heard round the world ; " 
 
 his greatest patriotic poem is " Volun- 
 taries," which treats of slavery and the 
 conflict between North and South. Free- 
 dom loves the North : — 
 
 " The snowflake is her hi 
 Her stripes the boreal streamers are." 
 
 It is this poem that answers the terrible 
 question, — 
 
 " Who shall nerve heroic boys 
 To hazard all in Freedom's fight ? " 
 
 with that mighty quatrain, — 
 
 " So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, * Thou must,' 
 The youth replies, ' I can.' " 
 
 Yet Emerson is greatest, not as philo- 
 sopher, poet, or patriot, but as helper of 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 77 
 
 men. He made men better by simply- 
 walking among them. I have spoken of 
 his face as a through-shine/' as transfig- 
 ured with love and refinement and wis- 
 dom, with the vision that shall not fade, — 
 
 " And never poor beseeching glance 
 Shamed that sculptured countenance." 
 
 It is much to remember him as I do, even 
 in his old age ; to have lived with those 
 to whom he was " Mr. Emerson," who 
 had known him early, and who loved him 
 as they loved no other man. Some of 
 you may secretly wonder whether he was 
 all that your elders have called him, just 
 as I used to wonder whether the Par- 
 thenon, the great temple at Athens, was 
 not Professor Norton's building rather 
 than mine, whether it would appeal to 
 such as I. When I saw the Parthenon, 
 even in its ruin, I accepted it instantly 
 and forever ; and if you could have seen 
 Emerson, even in his enfeebled old age, 
 you would have accepted him. 
 
78 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 " No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
 As I have seen in one autumnal face." 
 
 Emerson's face was the highest and the 
 loveliest and the most " through-shine," 
 because his life was all this. "Is it so 
 bad?" he wrote to a friend who had said 
 that " no one would dare to uncover the 
 thoughts of a single hour," — " Is it so 
 bad ? I own that to a witness worse than 
 myself and less intelligent I should not 
 willingly put a window into my breast. 
 But to a witness more intelligent and vir- 
 tuous than I, or to one precisely as in- 
 telligent and well intentioned, I have no 
 objection to uncover my heart." " He 
 was right," says Mr. Cabot, "he could 
 only have gained by it." " It was good," 
 says Hawthorne in a passage that Mr. 
 Cabot quotes, " to meet him in the wood- 
 paths or sometimes in our avenue with 
 that pure intellectual gleam diffusing 
 about his presence like the garment of a 
 shining one ; and he, so quiet, so simple, 
 so without pretension, encountering each 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 79 
 
 man alive as if expecting to receive more 
 than he would impart. It was impossible 
 to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling 
 more or less the mountain atmosphere 
 of his lofty thought." 
 
 Emerson himself has told us that 
 " Rectitude scatters favors on every side 
 without knowing it, and receives with 
 wonder the thanks of all people." So it 
 was with him; as it is written of one 
 whom no man was more like, "There 
 went virtue out of him and healed them 
 all." He who knew sorrow yet was glad, 
 who knew self-distrust yet stood self-reli- 
 ant, who knew weakness yet remained 
 strong, who knew bitterness yet kept 
 sweet, whose love of man and of nature 
 and of nature in man, shone through his 
 face, and through every page he wrote, 
 — he seemed to those near him the very 
 prophet of God, preaching hope, free- 
 dom, courage, the glory of a high and 
 simple life. "The sublime vision," he 
 says, " comes to the pure and simple soul 
 
8o ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 in a clean and chaste body." " If we live 
 truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for 
 the strong man to be strong as it is for 
 the weak to be weak." 
 
 " Teach me your mood, O patient stars ! 
 Who climb each night the ancient sky, 
 Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 
 No trace of age, no fear to die." 
 
 In his presence weak men were ashamed 
 that they had ever wondered whether it 
 was worth while to live ; for in his pre- 
 sence, even in the presence of what he 
 had written, it was harder to be a coward 
 than to be brave. 
 
 Of young people — not children, but 
 young men and women — he was the 
 supreme helper ; and we must remember 
 that it was not only neighbors and friends 
 who loved him, not only those that 
 touched the hem of his garment who 
 were made whole. His voice, his manner, 
 his presence, charmed and refined all who 
 came near him ; but his written words put 
 courage into ten thousand hearts. 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 81 
 
 "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates 
 to that iron string." 
 
 " We will walk on our own feet ; we 
 will work with our own hands ; we will 
 speak our own minds." 
 
 " If the single man plant himself in- 
 domitably on his instincts and there 
 abide, the huge world will come round 
 to him." 
 
 " We are parlor soldiers. We shun the 
 rugged battle of fate where strength is 
 born." 
 
 "But we sit and weep in vain. The 
 voice of the Almighty saith, ' Up and 
 onward forever more ! ' " 
 
 " Man is timid and apologetic ; he is 
 no longer upright ; he dares not say, ' I 
 think,' ' I am/ but quotes some saint or 
 sage. He is ashamed before the blade of 
 grass or the blowing rose. These roses 
 under my window make no reference to 
 former roses or to better ones ; they are 
 for what they are ; they exist with God 
 to-day." 
 
82 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 " I call upon you, young men, to obey 
 your heart and be the nobility of this 
 land." 
 
 Here is the star to which many an awk- 
 ward and timid country lad has hitched 
 his wagon ; the strong and steady light 
 to which the lights that flickered in a 
 thousand hearts have flashed their brav- 
 est answer. This gentle scholar was a 
 man, and a man who inspired others 
 with his own manliness. There was in 
 his philosophy no room for the weak and 
 lazy. With all his visions he had a keen 
 sense of the value of time, and expressed 
 it (with more truth than poetry) in " The 
 Visit : " — 
 
 " Askest, ' How long thou shalt stay ? 
 Devastator of the day ! " 
 
 " Do your work," he says, " and I shall 
 know you. Do your work and you shall 
 reinforce yourself. Do that which is as- 
 signed you, and you cannot hope too 
 much or dare too much." 
 
 " The distinction and end of a soundly 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 83 
 
 constituted man is his labor. Use is in- 
 scribed on all his faculties. Use is the 
 end to which he exists. As the tree ex- 
 ists for its fruit, so a man for his work. 
 A fruitless plant, an idle animal, does not 
 stand in the universe.' ' 
 
 He believed in work that left no time 
 for worrying : — 
 
 " But blest is he who playing deep yet haply asks 
 not why, 
 Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live 
 or die." 
 
 And he believed in work through every- 
 thing, — 
 
 "On bravely through the sunshine and the 
 showers ! 
 Time hath his work to do and we have ours." 
 
 Such was the courage of his preaching 
 and of his life. We are to be ourselves 
 in the present, not to make ourselves like 
 anybody else or like what we ourselves 
 have been. If we are inconsistent, no 
 matter ; if we are misunderstood, no 
 matter. " With consistency," he says, " a 
 
84 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 great soul has simply nothing to do. He 
 may as well concern himself with his 
 shadow on the wall. Speak what you 
 think now in hard words, and to-morrow 
 speak what to-morrow thinks in hard 
 words again, though it contradict every- 
 thing you said to-day. * Ah, so you shall 
 be sure to be misunderstood ! ' Is it so 
 bad, then, to be misunderstood? . . . 
 Every pure and wise spirit that ever 
 took flesh " has been misunderstood. 
 
 " Whenever a mind is simple and re- 
 ceives a divine wisdom, old things pass 
 away, — means, teachers, texts, temples 
 fall ; it lives now, and absorbs past and 
 future into the present hour." 
 
 " Our helm is given up to a better 
 guidance than our own ; the course of 
 events is quite too strong for any helms- 
 man, and our little wherry is taken in 
 tow by the ship of the great Admiral, 
 which knows the way, and has the force 
 to draw men and states and planets to 
 their good." 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 85 
 
 And there was no room in his philo- 
 sophy for the sickly and discontented. 
 As one of "the first obvious rules of 
 life," he says, " Get health." " And the 
 best part of health," he adds, " is fine dis- 
 position. It is more essential than talent, 
 even in the works of talent. Nothing will 
 supply the want of sunshine to peaches, 
 and to make knowledge valuable, you 
 must have the cheerfulness of wisdom." 
 
 " I know how easy it is to men of the 
 world to look grave, and sneer at your 
 sanguine youth and its glittering dreams. 
 But I find the gayest castles in the air 
 that were ever piled far better for com- 
 fort and for use than the dungeons in 
 the air that are daily dug and caverned 
 out by grumbling, discontented people." 
 
 Nor is cheerfulness for the young 
 only : — 
 
 " Spring still makes spring in the mind 
 When sixty years are told ; 
 Love wakes anew this throbbing heart 
 And we are never old. 
 
86 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 Over the winter glaciers 
 
 I see the summer glow, 
 
 And through the wild-piled snow-drift 
 
 The warm rosebuds below." 
 
 Even though old age bring loss of power, 
 it need not bring loss of cheerfulness : — 
 
 " As the bird trims her to the gale, 
 I trim myself to the storm of time ; 
 I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
 Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime, 
 
 1 Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
 Right onward drive unharmed ; 
 The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
 And every wave is charmed.' " 
 
 If disaster come, there is good in it. 
 "We learn geology the morning after the 
 earthquakec" 
 
 George Eliot tells us of a woman who 
 seemed among other people like a fine 
 quotation from the Bible in a paragraph 
 of a newspaper. Something like this 
 might be said of Emerson, who brought 
 into everyday life the help that cometh 
 from the hills. " I believe," says an old 
 friend of his, " no man ever had so deep 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 87 
 
 an influence as he had on the life and 
 thought of the young people of his day. 
 I think there are many who would say 
 . . . that it has been one of the chief 
 privileges of their life to have lived at 
 the same time with him." 
 
 I have tried to show you what Emer- 
 son has meant to American youth ; how 
 he has stood for pure life, high thought, 
 brave speech, patient and cheerful work ; 
 how he found in everything poetry and 
 a man's poetry, and revealed that poetry 
 to the world : but this is not all. It is as 
 easy to " put a girdle round about the 
 earth in forty minutes " as to compass 
 in half an hour a great man. I might 
 speak of him as a forerunner of Darwin. 
 "Man," he says, "is no upstart in the 
 creation, but has been prophesied in 
 nature for a thousand, thousand ages 
 before he appeared. . . . His limbs are 
 only a more exquisite organization — say 
 rather the finish — of the rudimental 
 
88 ADDRESS TO THE SCHOOL 
 
 forms that have been already sweeping 
 the sea and creeping in the mud ; the 
 brother of his hand is even now cleaving 
 the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, 
 and innumerable ages since was pawing 
 the marsh in the flipper of the saurian/ ' 
 I might speak of his Yankee humor, or 
 of his tenderness and romance, — 
 " The little Shakspeare in the maiden's heart 
 Makes Romeo of a ploughboy on his cart ; " 
 
 but I purposely let them pass with this 
 bare mention (as I let pass " The Tit- 
 mouse," "The Rhodora," "The Moun- 
 tain and the Squirrel," "The Humble- 
 bee ") ; for I wish you this day to think 
 of Emerson, living and dead, as a high 
 and helpful friend. There is no better 
 company, no better society, than his. 
 Read him and re-read him. Do not try 
 to write like him : he would have you 
 write like none but yourselves ; and be- 
 sides, his style is his and his only. Do 
 not try to be like him, except so far as in 
 being your best selves you come into 
 
CHILDREN OF CONCORD 89 
 
 the likeness of all who are good and 
 true. When you read him, do not be 
 troubled if you lose the thread of his 
 thought ; he himself did that ; yet, as a 
 young man once said of him, " His say- 
 ings are like the stars, which are scat- 
 tered disorderly but together make a 
 firmament of light." 
 
 "Hundreds of people," says Ruskin, 
 "can talk for one who can think; but 
 thousands can think for one who can see. 
 To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and 
 religion all in one." 
 
 This man who walked your streets, and 
 loved them, spoke with a voice that is 
 rare in any race or time ; he thought as 
 it is given to few to think ; and he saw. 
 We have had no man like him. I will 
 not say that we have had none so great. 
 Lincoln may have been greater. They 
 are so different that we cannot compare 
 the two ; and yet, as Lincoln's procla- 
 mation brought life and hope to cap- 
 tive hearts, so did the brave word that 
 
9 o TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN 
 
 Emerson spoke flash on the souls of men 
 the truth that they were slaves no more ; 
 that each might and must stand to his 
 work erect and strong, since nature and 
 God were his very own. The eyes of the 
 blind were opened, and the ears of the 
 deaf unstopped ; "for he came that they 
 might have life, and that they might have 
 it more abundantly." 
 
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 
 
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT 
 WELLESLEY COLLEGE 
 
 The last weeks of a Senior resemble in 
 one respect the first weeks of a Fresh- 
 man : they are too complexly active, too 
 bewildering, for thought. Professors, ex- 
 aminations, literary work, friendships, 
 relatives, sweethearts, and plans of life 
 whirl through a Senior's head and set 
 it whirling with them. Then, as always, 
 after exaltation comes depression. Clear- 
 ing up after anything is a searching test 
 of cheerfulness ; and clearing up after 
 four of the richest years that youth 
 can know, sending away your furni- 
 ture from the room you love, bidding 
 good-by to scores of fellow students 
 whose lives have been very near your 
 own, and doing it all with the reaction- 
 
94 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 ary weariness that follows prolonged 
 excitement, is sad business, even for a 
 sound-minded girl who is eager to do 
 her part in a newly opening world. On 
 the morning after Class Day in Cam- 
 bridge, some years ago, an uncommonly 
 healthy Senior who had played in the 
 University football team and who could 
 not be charged with maudlin sentiment, 
 got up at five, sat on the steps of Uni- 
 versity Hall in the middle of the College 
 Yard, and wept. Before he went away, 
 he said, he must have the Yard for once 
 to himself : — 
 
 " ' T were profanation of our joys 
 To tell the laity our love." 
 
 In this reaction, when you have shuf- 
 fled off the coil of your last college days 
 and find yourself face to face with a new 
 life or with the return to an old one, you 
 are prone to ask, " What has it all been 
 for ? Am I fitter for the life I must live 
 than if I had been living it four years 
 already ? College has been fascinating, 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 95 
 
 no doubt ; but many fascinating things 
 do not pay. I have opened several doors 
 to knowledge, and have learned that, 
 work as hard and as long as I may, I 
 can never see the thousandth part of 
 that to which a single one of them may 
 lead ; I have formed friendships that will 
 last ; I have won something with which 
 I would not part for money and without 
 which I can no more imagine myself 
 than I can conceive myself annihilated. 
 These college years have become an in- 
 extricable part of me ; yet am I, after 
 all, happier and better than if I had 
 never tasted their sweetness — had never 
 caught glimpses of ideals that in every- 
 day life may be my rebuke and my de- 
 spair ?" In a small degree you feel as 
 men and women feel when they wake to 
 the truth that their elders have moved 
 on; that they themselves are now the 
 older generation to whom the younger 
 turns for counsel ; that other people will 
 lean on them, and that the days when 
 
96 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 they may lean on other people are gone 
 and gone forever. 
 
 When we say "What is it for?" let 
 us first take care to recognize, as college 
 people should, many things for which a 
 life is worth living besides what is com- 
 monly called practical. Lowell reminds 
 us that the question "What is it good 
 for?" "would abolish the rose and be 
 answered triumphantly by the cabbage." 
 "The danger of the prosaic type of 
 mind," he adds, " lies in the stolid sense 
 of superiority which blinds it to every- 
 thing ideal, to the use of anything that 
 does not serve the practical purposes 
 of life." Now a man whose scheme of 
 life is a cabbage scheme, who can go 
 through college with no glimpse of the 
 vision without which all is dark and 
 dead, is too abnormal for our purposes 
 to-day : and if this is true of a man, it is 
 truer of a woman ; for in every part of 
 life women take more kindly to the ideal. 
 Yet if a college graduate tries to earn a 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 9; 
 
 living by raising cabbages, or by keep- 
 ing hens, or by any other unimaginative 
 occupation, I believe (so deep is my 
 faith in college training) that he or she 
 will make up, even in such a prosaic 
 field, for the years that might seem lost. 
 "They jump farthest," says Ben Jonson, 
 * * that fetch their race largest. ' ' President 
 Hyde has pointed out that the apparent 
 delaying of a life work by the years at 
 college is like the stopping of a stream 
 by a dam to give it accumulated power. 
 He speaks of men ; but what he says 
 applies to women also. Those persons 
 who disparage a college education for 
 men point to the self-made men of busi- 
 ness who have climbed high : but of 
 these self-made men the best openly ex- 
 press as the great regret of their lives 
 their want of a college education ; and 
 of the worst, many, I suspect, grieve in 
 their heart of hearts for the education 
 they decry. They think perhaps of so- 
 cial advantage, of culture, of knowledge ; 
 
98 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 they might well think also of the grasp 
 of a trained mind and of the wisdom 
 that should come with a wider outlook. 
 Those who disparage a college educa- 
 tion for women go further and wound 
 deeper. "Toa woman," they say, " such 
 an education is a social ^advantage ; 
 for it spoils her. The ideal of manhood 
 is one thing, that of womanhood another. 
 Learning and the learned professions 
 are for men; public life is for men. It 
 remains for women to make themselves 
 charming through their accomplishments 
 and to live in their affections. A mascu- 
 line woman is as bad as an effeminate 
 man ; and a pedantic woman is worse 
 than either. Moreover, studying mars 
 beauty, for which every woman longs, 
 whether she admits it or not, and to 
 which every man, whatever he may say, 
 pays gratifying homage." All this has 
 been said so often that I hesitate to re- 
 peat it ; yet, however familiar it is, and 
 however false it may be, it raises a ques- 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 99 
 
 tion that is vital. "In college study," 
 said a great man, "it seems conclu- 
 sively proved that women can do all 
 that men can do — we do not yet know 
 at what sacrifice." Is there necessarily a 
 sacrifice ? 
 
 First, as to pedantry. No doubt we 
 have all seen young women in whom 
 college education developed a pedantry 
 to which they were predisposed ; and 
 we have seen just such young men. Yet 
 among the agents for knocking ped- 
 antry out of young people I should count 
 college life. In college if we appear 
 pedantic, our friends contrive to tell us 
 so in ways hard to forget ; and besides, 
 the more we know, the more we know 
 we don't know. Just as the study of 
 Anglo-Saxon is the best remedy for mis- 
 taken purism, so in every part of learn- 
 ing, one good look at the mountains of 
 knowledge, however far away, shows us 
 pedantry and dogmatism as the miser- 
 able little molehills that they really are. 
 
 .LofC. 
 
ioo COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 After all, learning is no necessary part of 
 the equipment of a pedant. Mr. Casau- 
 bon was no more a pedant than Mr. 
 Micawber, nor Anna Comnena than Mrs. 
 Malaprop. Nor are masculine women 
 commoner in college than out of it ; there 
 is no sex in learning and nothing un- 
 gentle. Nor does college study, mingled 
 with the out-of-door life in a place like 
 this, hurt either complexion or constitu- 
 tion so much as parties and theatre- 
 going. I doubt whether any one of you 
 has ever lived or will ever live a healthier 
 life than she has lived here, or a life of 
 higher and more womanly ideals. One 
 girl means to be a teacher ; another, 
 though not a teacher or anything with 
 a distinct name, means to be an alert, 
 intelligent, helpful member of society. 
 Each comes to college that, working and 
 playing with other girls both like and un- 
 like herself, she may look wider and 
 deeper over and into human life, — not 
 that she may be less womanly, but 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 101 
 
 that she may be more of a woman. 
 If now and then the love of learning 
 and the discovery of scholarly talent 
 lead a girl to give up all thought of 
 a domestic life, it is not pedantry or 
 masculinity ; it is rather the deliberate 
 dedication of her strength to what she 
 believes to be its fitting service. " I shall 
 never forget," said a college boy, " the 
 way Professor X talked of ethics — as if 
 ethics were his daughter." This is the 
 way some women feel about learning, or 
 philanthropy, or any other great cause 
 to which they give their lives ; and who 
 shall say that they are wrong ? 
 
 The one serious danger which I can 
 see in a college education for women is 
 the danger of intellectual unrest, of chaf- 
 ing, in the daily duties of later life, at the 
 meagreness of intellectual opportunity. 
 A man, even by those who regard his 
 college life as an essential social experi- 
 ence to be achieved with the least possi- 
 ble study, is expected on leaving college 
 
102 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 to get work at once. A woman is ex- 
 pected to get it if there is nobody to 
 support her : otherwise she may go home 
 and may find between her college life 
 and the home life that she reenters a 
 perilous gap. Suppose she goes out into 
 what is called society. After four years 
 of steady employment, of constant, stim- 
 ulating friendship, of high intellectual 
 privilege, and of rapid growth in taste 
 and knowledge, how mean and weari- 
 some and inexcusable seems the round 
 of parties and calls, how cheap much of 
 what she used to regard as intellectual ! 
 She may have to live in a town where 
 the leading thinkers discuss the attri- 
 butes of " the pagan god Ze-us " and find 
 the highest achievement of literature in 
 the chariot race from " Ben Hur." How 
 shall she adjust herself to such a life as 
 this ? how live in it with modest strength ? 
 Or suppose her parents are country peo- 
 ple and she goes home to help her 
 mother. Disgusted with herself as she 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 103 
 
 may be at the discovery, she may find 
 that her family, though no less lovable 
 than of old, are, for steady company, less 
 interesting. As President Eliot says of 
 university football players after a great 
 contest, "the return to normal life is 
 difficult;" or — to cite and adapt the 
 words of another man — " She has looked 
 her last upon the world of art and lit- 
 erature and intellectual delight, within 
 whose borders she has been permitted 
 to dwell for four years, tasting of the 
 pleasures that are not her birthright." 
 
 Or suppose a girl teaches school and 
 finds herself in a remote town where she 
 is sandwiched between crude children 
 on one side and a half-educated superin- 
 tendent and several illiterate committee 
 men on the other — a town whose soci- 
 ety is undermined by gossip and whose 
 school system is honeycombed with poli- 
 tics. Is this the promised joy of the in- 
 tellectual life ? Or suppose she sees the 
 need of trained women in stenography, 
 
104 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 the quick accuracy of hand and brain 
 which it demands, the intimate know- 
 ledge of business which it develops, the 
 posts of responsibility to which it may 
 lead. In her new enthusiasm she begins 
 work at a business school. She finds 
 there few fellow students whose ideals 
 and tastes are hers ; but she is there for 
 work, not for companionship, and she 
 keeps on. At last, unless she has excep- 
 tional fortune or uses exceptional care, 
 she may find that, in a business office, 
 with a beginner's pay, with long hours 
 and short vacations, she has much to 
 bear from men who, whether they pass 
 for gentlemen or not, are not gentlemen 
 to her. How can she, with the refinement 
 and the love of leadership which her 
 intellectual life has fostered, endure a 
 drudging inferiority to men whom she 
 knows herself to be immeasurably above ? 
 A man must submit to it in the begin- 
 ning; but a man is of coarser fibre. 
 Besides, a man knows that hard and able 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 105 
 
 work will bring a man's reward ; whereas 
 a woman knows that, partly because 
 people are prejudiced but chiefly be- 
 cause men and women are eternally un- 
 like, she cannot hope for those positions 
 which demand continuity of physical 
 strength, grasp (not merely insight) in 
 meeting large problems day after day, 
 and unprotected association with all 
 kinds of people. Women who can fill 
 such positions are so few that we may 
 pass them by. As the power, not on the 
 throne but behind it, as the leaven that 
 lifts men to higher things, as the stand- 
 ard of unselfishness, devotion, purity, 
 and faith, women may at some time re- 
 form and transform the business world : 
 but they will not often be good heads 
 of business houses ; they may be good 
 physicians, but they will rarely be good 
 lawyers ; they may be, and often are, 
 mentally and morally head and shoul- 
 ders above the preachers to whom they 
 listen with steady loyalty, but they will 
 
io6 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 be better ministers' wives than minis- 
 ters. 
 
 Or suppose a girl marries and keeps 
 house. With the constant thought for 
 her husband and children, with the con- 
 stant details of a housekeeper's routine, 
 how shall she feed her mind ? Possibly 
 her husband, in a dark little office all 
 day, cannot feed his ; but he is a man, and 
 cares less. " Was all my training, then," 
 she cries, " a training for servitude? " 
 
 How long it takes us to learn that " the 
 word of God is not bound ; " that what 
 is enslaved in us is not the soul, which 
 is our birthright, but a changeling that 
 while we slept has stolen into its place ; 
 and that what enslaves is not the routine 
 of life but the chafing at the routine ! 
 how long it takes us to see that every 
 life without a light in it is dull, that no 
 life with a light in it can be dull, and that 
 whether the light is there or not is a 
 matter of our own will ! As we see deeper 
 and deeper into the complex sorrow of 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 107 
 
 the world about us, we cannot be gay 
 of heart, but we may and we should be 
 happy ; and in hard work lighted by 
 hope and courage and love we may learn 
 that the constancy of routine is the con- 
 stancy of a friend. Life is sure to be 
 complicated, and it may be sad : but to 
 a right-minded man or woman there is 
 one thing it can never be — it can never 
 be uninteresting ; and there is one thing 
 it must always be — it must always be 
 active. Moreover, in this activity every 
 particle of learning or of training or of 
 mere social experience that your college 
 has given you is bound to tell. If what- 
 ever you do is not done more intelli- 
 gently and more earnestly for your col- 
 lege education, the trouble is not in the 
 college education but in you : you are 
 the wrong kind of girl. 
 
 If you have to earn a living and begin 
 at the bottom, make the bottom stronger 
 because you are there. Then trust to 
 time. So few workers in proportion to 
 
108 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 the whole number give themselves in- 
 telligently, loyally, and unreservedly to 
 their immediate duty that if you thus give 
 yourself you cannot but succeed. Thou- 
 sands of people in small positions whine 
 because their talents are thrown away — 
 because their ability has no elbow-room. 
 It is not elbow-room that they need ; it 
 is " elbow - grease ; " it is energy and 
 strength. Their very whining shows that 
 they are too small for the places they are 
 in now. When the right kind of person 
 has too small a place, he does his work 
 so well as to make the place bigger ; 
 people see in it more than they ever saw 
 before. He who laments that an unap- 
 preciative world has slighted his talents 
 is a more wicked and slothful servant 
 than he who hides his one talent in a 
 napkin. Do your work and you will 
 succeed. Your idea of success may be 
 different from what it would be if you 
 had not come to college. I should be 
 sorry if it were not ; for these four years 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 109 
 
 have brought you possessions which will 
 transform your whole life. 
 
 Among these possessions is college 
 loyalty. We sometimes forget that from 
 the moment of our entering a college we 
 have become a part of it, and it has be- 
 come a part of us, inevitably and forever. 
 We owe it money perhaps ; allegiance 
 certainly and always. It is for us to keep 
 our Alma Mater honored and wise and 
 young. " We are all better Harvard men 
 now," said the president of the Harvard 
 Club of Chicago, "than when we were 
 in college ; " and he was right. Much 
 as you love Wellesley to-day, your love 
 of her will deepen with the years and 
 will take on more and more of the spirit 
 of high romance till you yourselves will 
 marvel at the magic of the Alma Mater's 
 name. " This," as Mr. Justice Holmes 
 said of something else, " is that little 
 touch of the superfluous which is neces- 
 sary. Necessary as art is necessary and 
 knowledge which serves no mechanical 
 
no COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 end. Superfluous only as glory is super- 
 fluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man 
 would die to win." 
 
 Besides drawing the breath of college 
 loyalty, which may find expression in a 
 thousand ways, the graduate should have 
 achieved ability to look at more than one 
 side of a question. Men who " know 
 black and white but not gray " find much 
 less discomfort and much more self-satis- 
 faction than men who know gray in all 
 shades, and to whom scarcely anything 
 is unquestioned white or black. Men 
 who see every object as if it lay between 
 two walls, and see it clearly and see it 
 hard, have less to keep them awake 
 nights than men who know no walls and 
 see every object as one part of a wide- 
 spreading and complex universe; but 
 only the latter can be wise. There is no 
 wisdom without acute sensitiveness such 
 as gives to any soul but the sublimely 
 great varied and constant pain. Yet who 
 would shrink from the pain of wider sym- 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE m 
 
 pathy, of quicker discernment, of more 
 abundant life? From the beginning, 
 knowledge has brought its sorrow. Ca- 
 pacity for keener joy means capacity 
 for sharper grief: without capacity for 
 sharper grief there is no capacity for 
 higher service ; and the glory of the 
 highest service was the Cross. 
 
 Whatever you do, do it heart and soul, 
 but do not sell yourself to it : — 
 
 " Because a man has shop to mind 
 In time and place, since flesh must live, 
 Needs spirit lack all life behind, 
 All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, 
 All loves except what trade can give ? 
 
 But — shop each day and all day long ! 
 Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
 Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong ! 
 From where these sorts of treasures are 
 There should our hearts be — Christ, how far ! " 
 
 " The trouble with that man," said one 
 of our best university chemists of one of 
 his best pupils, "is that he is nothing 
 but a chemist." 
 
ii2 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 Yet we must not make shop one thing 
 and life another ; and since we must not 
 make life shop, we must make shop life. 
 Into everything we do we must try to 
 put leaven. If asked for what college 
 stands beyond all else, I should be 
 tempted to say, " For the high meaning 
 of the everyday act and the everyday 
 life ; for the beauty of work, of unselfish 
 devoted work, with ambition to do the 
 appointed task." If a higher task comes, 
 take it as you took the lower — always 
 with scrupulous fidelity and with that 
 touch of something beyond mere accu- 
 racy which makes fidelity heroic. I have 
 seen men and women filling subordinate 
 positions with this kind of heroism — 
 men and women whose lives, shut close 
 as it seemed on every side, would have 
 been arid as the sand if, in their hearts, 
 they had not said, like Christian's daugh- 
 ter in " The Pilgrim's Progress," " I pur- 
 pose never to have a clog to my soul." 
 
 I say all this because there was never 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 113 
 
 greater need of that fidelity whereby the 
 drudgery of daily life becomes transfig- 
 ured. " Much of my life," said President 
 Eliot once, " is what many persons would 
 call drudgery. Within a few days I have 
 gone through the entire salary list of the 
 instructors and assistants in the univer- 
 sity; and I do it every year." No one 
 knows better than he that the president 
 of a college or the president of a country is 
 more slave than king, and that nowadays 
 a king is a kind of slave. Success does 
 not and cannot mean escape from work. 
 Yet on every side we see men demand- 
 ing a full share of the luxuries of life and 
 a decrease of its labor. Eight hours of 
 eager unremitting work may be enough 
 for a mechanic or for a common laborer ; 
 but how many give even that ? How a 
 little or a good deal is shaved off each 
 end of the day and off both sides of the 
 middle ! how languidly and perfunctorily 
 the task is done ! Street laborers, elbow 
 to elbow, feebly lift their picks a few 
 
114 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 inches above the surface of the earth and 
 trust the fall to the force of gravity; 
 washerwomen charge you by the hour 
 for eating copious and frequent meals 
 in your kitchen ; carpenters light their 
 pipes over your sawdust and shavings 
 and chat pleasantly at your expense with 
 whoever passes by. "Less work for 
 more money ! " is the constant cry ; and 
 if the cost of living increases (as it must 
 when everybody does less work for more 
 money), less work and more money still. 
 I have known a man hauling stone to 
 leave a block in a crooked woods road 
 where it wrecked the next carriage, be- 
 cause five o'clock had come and nothing 
 (with an oath) should make him work 
 after five o'clock. Charles Dudley War- 
 ner prophesies that, when labor gets 
 to be ten dollars a day, the workmen 
 will not come at all — " they will send 
 their cards." Everywhere men proceed 
 on the assumption that the ideal life is 
 not to work at all and to be paid hand- 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 115 
 
 somely for not working. Yet there is no 
 more elusive happiness than the happi- 
 ness of not working. He who takes labor 
 as self-respecting service which yields 
 daily bread to him and his and which 
 makes his life worth something is happy 
 in his work and wants to do all the work 
 he can ; he who takes it as a necessary 
 evil is never happy in or out of it and is 
 of small use in the world : — 
 
 "He is a swinward, but I think 
 No swinward of the best ; 
 For much he recketh of his swink 
 And carketh for his rest." 
 
 The college man or woman should learn 
 that in an earnest world no loafer counts. 
 One of the most industrious and use- 
 ful men I know has had no fixed occu- 
 pation ; but he wastes less time than 
 most professional men, and much less 
 than most so-called laboring men. "It 
 is only the laboring classes," some one 
 has said, " who can afford an eight-hour 
 day." He who goes to his work with the 
 
n6 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 right spirit will soon find more work. 
 His usefulness makes him known ; and 
 he is unexpectedly called on for many 
 kinds of service. " That 's a good man," 
 says Hawkins of Scott in Mr. Kipling's 
 " William the Conqueror." " If all goes 
 well, I shall work him hard." "This," 
 the author adds, "was Jim Hawkins's 
 notion of the highest compliment one 
 human being could pay another." Not 
 one of us has an excuse for becoming 
 what Homer calls an ax#os dpovp^s, a dead 
 weight on the earth. Every college man 
 or woman is in honor bound to be not 
 disobedient to the heavenly vision, and, 
 in the light of that vision, to lead a life 
 of work. 
 
 But what of marriage ? It was of pro- 
 posed or suggested marriage, you re- 
 member, that Christian's daughter said 
 what I have quoted — not of marriage 
 in general, but of marriage with an alert, 
 self-seeking, unprincipled man, like some 
 of the so-called "hustlers" of to-day. 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 117 
 
 Now I believe in marriage with all my 
 heart ; and I believe in the marriage of 
 educated women — provided they marry 
 the right men. I have heard it whispered 
 that women often wonder at the kind of 
 girls men marry. " Love is said to be 
 blind," an American humorist remarked. 
 " But," he added, " I know some fellows 
 who see more in their girls than ever I 
 could." Yet for every man who clogs 
 his soul with a wife there must be sev- 
 eral women who clog their souls with 
 husbands. "It is astonishing," said a 
 friend of mine, " how many women are 
 willing to take upon themselves the sup- 
 port of inefficient men ; " if women knew 
 what they should know, it would be 
 more astonishing how many women and 
 what good women will marry fast men. 
 The woman of to-day should be shel- 
 tered from the evil of the world by every 
 man who has chivalry in him ; but the 
 educated woman of to-day should not be 
 kept in ignorance of such evil as may 
 
u8 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 come close to her own life and the lives 
 of her nearest and dearest. There is 
 no excuse for an education that suffers 
 a clean-hearted girl to crown what she 
 would call the "wild" life of her lover 
 with a halo of romance. She should know 
 just what such a life means before she 
 consents to marry a man who leads or 
 has led it. The fancied loss of refine- 
 ment in her knowing is nothing to the 
 loss of refinement that may result from 
 her not knowing. I do not say that a 
 woman is never justified in marrying 
 such a man ; for she may be : I say that 
 she should know what she is doing ; that 
 the new physical and mental training of 
 women should not suffer them to be in 
 dark ignorance of the vital truths and 
 the vital dangers in their very woman- 
 hood. 
 
 In speaking of the relation between 
 women and men, I pass from morals to 
 manners. The wonderful femininity of a 
 girls' college may make girls sufficient 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 119 
 
 unto themselves ; or it may make them 
 overvalue men as men (a boys' college 
 has corresponding dangers). Too often 
 among the girls of to-day the new and 
 healthy freedom of young women longs 
 to exercise itself, not in the development 
 of women as women, but in the assimi- 
 lating of women to men. This assimilat- 
 ing belongs to modern life in general 
 and not to college life in particular. In 
 one of Miss Ferrier's novels a gentleman 
 walking with two ladies in broad day- 
 light gives an arm to each. A genera- 
 tion or two ago a gentleman who did 
 not offer his arm to a lady in the even- 
 ing would hardly have been a gentleman 
 at all ; now (I say it with regret) a gen- 
 tleman who does offer it is either rustic 
 or old-fashioned. The girl of to-day has 
 more independent manners and, happily, 
 has along with them a freer life. She 
 may ride a horse without an accompany- 
 ing groom ; she may bestride a horse ; 
 she may row and run and swim and 
 
120 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 take her part in a hundred athletic ex- 
 ercises without being one whit less a 
 woman : but some things she had better 
 leave to men. Fiercely competitive ath- 
 letics have their dangers for men ; but 
 they develop manly strength : for women 
 their dangers are greater ; and the quali- 
 ties that they tend to develop are not 
 womanly. Outside of athletics, too, girls 
 who imitate men are prone to imitate 
 their inferiorities. I am so old-fashioned 
 as to believe that girls who smoke ciga- 
 rettes are degenerate ; that girls who use 
 the rough language of men are, as some 
 one has put it, "no gentlemen ;" and 
 that even college girls who steal signs 
 are thieves. I do not deny that the in- 
 born right of woman to smoke cigarettes 
 and steal signs is equal to that of man ; 
 yet, if the sexes are to be equalized, I 
 could wish it were by the refining of men 
 and not by the vulgarizing of women. 
 The modern girl whose early manners 
 are moulded by " Alice in Wonderland," 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 121 
 
 wherein everybody flatly contradicts 
 everybody else, and who, as she grows 
 up, meets constant temptation to mas- 
 culine inferiority, runs the risk of losing 
 that gentleness which is not merely one 
 of her charms but one source of her 
 strength. 
 
 When a man whom we have learned 
 to respect tells a story such as men often 
 tell among themselves, he is not quite 
 the same man to us that he was before ; 
 when women to whom we look for all 
 that is pure and high fall short of the 
 standard we have believed to be theirs, 
 much of their power is gone forever. Is 
 it just to expect of women more than we 
 expect of men? Possibly not just, but 
 better than just. To hold either men or 
 women responsible for the moral charac- 
 ter of all persons with whom they deal — 
 of all actors, for example, whom they see 
 on the stage — would be worse than ab- 
 surd ; yet it is a constant source of won- 
 der to me what theatrical shows good 
 
122 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 women will go to, and will cheerfully 
 discuss as the natural amusements of 
 ladies and gentlemen. So, too, with 
 reading. Some women, no doubt, do 
 not care for Browning ; and some are 
 ashamed to speak of him for fear they 
 shall be called pedantic : yet few are 
 ashamed to know all the transient novels 
 of the day ; and some are chagrined if 
 they cannot keep abreast of the stories 
 in the leading magazines, as some are 
 troubled if they do not know what is 
 going on at the principal theatres. You 
 educated women can exert a vast influ- 
 ence on the reading taste of the next 
 generation — against vulgarity and un- 
 scrupulousness in what is called " jour- 
 nalism;" against novels and plays that 
 tend to undermine the sacredness of 
 marriage ; against plays in Which low 
 women drilled by lower men are the 
 chief attraction : and you can exert this 
 influence, not by public invectives which 
 advertise and encourage what they con- 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 123 
 
 demn, not by ostentatious virtue, but by 
 the quiet abstinence which assumes that 
 those whom you love will love whatso- 
 ever things are pure and lovely and of 
 good report ; not by the blind innocence 
 of a child, but by the clear-seeing, intel- 
 ligent earnestness of a woman who ab- 
 hors that which is evil and cleaves to that 
 which is good. In the days when you 
 have to "make time" for reading, read 
 your newspaper to learn what is doing 
 in the world, — not to learn that "the 
 bride [whom you do not know] was 
 charmingly gowned in white satin," or 
 that the divorced wife of some second- 
 rate actor is expected to marry a Wall 
 Street broker, or that the police have 
 unearthed a new witness in the trial of 
 Pietro Mazzi for the murder of his rival. 
 There is much wisdom in that observa- 
 tion of Thoreau's : "If we read of one 
 man robbed, or murdered, or killed by 
 accident, or one house burned, or one 
 vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown 
 
124 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 up, or one cow run over on the Western 
 Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one 
 lot of grasshoppers in the winter — 
 we never need read of another. One 
 is enough. If you are acquainted with 
 the principle, what do you care for a 
 myriad instances and applications ? " 
 
 " To read well," says the same philo- 
 sopher, " that is, to read true books in 
 a true spirit, is a noble exercise and one 
 that will task the reader more than any 
 exercise which the customs of the day 
 esteem. It requires a training such as 
 the athletes underwent." Keep in train- 
 ing ; read daily if you can — and you 
 nearly always can — a little of " the best 
 that has been known and thought in the 
 world." As some one has said, adapting 
 the Scripture, " Keep the windows open 
 toward Jerusalem." Learn some things 
 by heart for dark and wakeful hours, and 
 see how the poetry reveals itself more 
 and more clearly, till the obscure is full 
 of meaning and the great and high and 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 125 
 
 simple has increased its own meaning 
 tenfold. What are murder and millinery 
 to such reading- as this ? 
 
 Let us consider for what the intellec- 
 tual life of a girls' college chiefly stands : 
 not for the belittling of those graceful 
 accomplishments which add to the joy 
 of life, but for something solid, to which, 
 if time serves, those accomplishments 
 may be added ; not for what is called, 
 almost in cant, self-development, unless 
 self-development is to end in self-forget- 
 fulness ; not for a life of exclusive spe- 
 cialization, which is too often an arid 
 life ; not for such a reaction from over- 
 femininity as shall lead to absorption in 
 clubs and politics. It stands for the de- 
 velopment, in a woman, of a clear-headed 
 integrity which, when supported by her 
 intuitive insight, makes her life the best 
 human standard of right and wrong. 
 The untrained woman sometimes amazes 
 us by such untruthfulness as would ostra- 
 cize a man. An extreme example is Nora 
 
126 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 in Ibsen's " A Doll's House." When her 
 husband is sick, she raises money to take 
 him on a journey ; and she raises it by 
 forging a signature. Confronted with the 
 charge of crime, she fails to see the point : 
 " Do you mean to say that it was wrong 
 to save my husband's life ? " 
 
 Mr. Meredith, you may remember, in 
 " Diana of the Crossways," makes his 
 heroine, who is betrothed to a minister 
 of state and has run heavily into debt 
 entertaining him and his friends, sell to 
 a newspaper a state secret he has given 
 her overnight. This instance is hardly 
 fair, since those of us who have watched 
 Diana up to the fatal moment believe 
 (we think we know) that such a woman 
 could not do such an act, and suspect that 
 her betrayal of the Honorable Percy is a 
 tour de force of Mr. Meredith, who needs 
 somehow to get the Honorable Percy out 
 of the way and to clear the deck for 
 Tom Redworth, the man of Mr. Mere- 
 dith's choice ; yet the mere fact that this 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 127 
 
 novelist could make an upright and loyal 
 and able woman do through mental con- 
 fusion an act in itself so base is significant. 
 Among the people who are intellectually 
 rather than morally untruthful, who would 
 tell the truth if they saw it but who can- 
 not see it, there are, I am afraid, more 
 women than men — women whose sense 
 of history is intuitive and whose sense of 
 present fact is more emotional than sci- 
 entific. Even women who have set out 
 to purify politics have proposed as mat- 
 ters of course such political schemes as 
 no honest man would endure. Now col- 
 lege training does not stifle the emotional 
 in women ; but it may train women to 
 see clearly and to speak accurately. The 
 best poet is no less a poet for knowing 
 how to write prose ; and the best train- 
 ing of the mind is no clog to the soul. 
 
 Girls' colleges were not created to 
 make girls imitate men, even in their 
 minds ; they were created to correct the 
 weakness and to strengthen the strength 
 
128 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 of women as women. In purity of heart, 
 in self-forgetful service, in spiritual in- 
 sight, in nearly all that is devoted and 
 deep and high, the women of civilized 
 countries have advanced far beyond the 
 men. If along with this advance there 
 once sprang up in our weaker sisters the 
 notion that timidity is pretty, that inva- 
 lidism is interesting, and that uselessness 
 is a charm, let us thank the century that 
 has just closed for clearing the air. Let 
 us thank the girls' colleges for their re- 
 cognition of the claims of a girl's mind, 
 for their strong common sense, for their 
 ideals of womanhood. Now for good and 
 now for evil, the power of women is 
 everywhere in the land. Half the bad 
 things done by men are done under the 
 fascination of those women who draw 
 men down ; nearly all the good things 
 are done with the courage that men get 
 from women who believe in them. As to 
 public life, I am still so conservative as to 
 hold that a political competition of both 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 129 
 
 sexes is less likely to elevate men than 
 to degrade women, and that the peculiar 
 strength of refined and earnest woman- 
 hood is exercised in ways less public. 
 I fear the loss of the best that is in wo- 
 man — and, with it, the loss of a power 
 that is hers and hers alone. 
 
 I have spoken too much of what wo- 
 men should not do and have said little 
 of what they can do — of what they must 
 do if they are to fulfil the high possibili- 
 ties of their lives. If I have rushed in 
 where angels fear to tread, I have done 
 it as one who loves and reverences good 
 women beyond all else on earth. As sis- 
 ters, as wives, as mothers, as friends, as 
 helpers to all that is noble, you the edu- 
 cated women of this generation have a 
 responsibility and an influence that should 
 make you at once happy and grave — 
 happy because of the limitless power for 
 good that comes of doing day by day 
 what must be done, and of seeing, even 
 in the drudgery of it, " a light that never 
 
130 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 was on sea or land ; " grave, lest in 
 times of human weakness, you may turn 
 from the light and may see only a sad 
 and dull routine in a world of darkness 
 and sorrow. In these hours, which may 
 be only the reactionary consequence of 
 the best work you have ever done — the 
 nervous depression that follows nervous 
 exaltation — learn to say with the old 
 philosopher, "This too shall pass," and 
 learn to look, even at your own weari- 
 ness, with the eyes of a poet. For I still 
 believe that, though few women have 
 been great poets, it is part of a woman's 
 mission to put poetry into life. 
 
 Going back to the rose and the cab- 
 bage, I may say that the college woman's 
 business is not to scorn the cabbage but 
 to invest it with a rose motive, to see the 
 light that kindles the commonplace into 
 everlasting truth. People talk a good 
 deal about loss of dignity; but the one 
 sure way of losing dignity is through 
 constant fear of losing it. I like that 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 131 
 
 story of President Roosevelt which says 
 that, as he travelled by coach from his 
 sister's country place to the Yale Bicen- 
 tennial Celebration, he left the carriage 
 and walked a while for exercise ; and, as 
 he walked, he saw a farmer vainly trying 
 to get his cows in ; and he sprang over 
 the wall, drove the cows to the farmer, 
 and ran back. The story, I fear, is ficti- 
 tious ; but that people should believe it, 
 is to the President's honor. His notion 
 of dignity is his own and might not do 
 for everybody; nor would some other 
 man's dignity make up in him for the 
 loss of that informal and vigorous natu- 
 ralness which endears him to all who 
 know him and to thousands, to millions, 
 who do not. 
 
 The college graduate who, as such, is 
 too fastidious for any honest, helpful work 
 has missed one of the best things that 
 either college or Christianity can teach. 
 Among the many sentences that stand 
 by you in Mr. Kipling's " William the 
 
132 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 Conqueror," that wonderful story to 
 which I have already referred, is Haw- 
 kins's remark when he is reproached for 
 the kind of work he is giving Scott. 
 
 "He's not a coolie," says the heroine 
 wrathfully ; " he ought to be doing his 
 regulation work." 
 
 " He 's the best man in the service," 
 Hawkins answers, a and that 's saying a 
 good deal ; but if you must use razors 
 to cut grindstones, why, I prefer the best 
 cutlery." 
 
 Every day of our lives we see fine steel 
 put to coarse uses ; and sometimes we 
 rebel at a world where such things can 
 and must go on. We see quiveringly 
 delicate lives dashing themselves, as it 
 seems, against hard, unyielding wicked- 
 ness ; and we cry out at the wrong. We 
 forget that it is sensitive men and women 
 who can do the best work among men 
 and women, because they and they only 
 can understand hearts unlike their own ; 
 because they and they only can see the 
 
AT WELLES LEY COLLEGE 133 
 
 glory of the forbidding task. Even the 
 same quality that without training makes 
 them lose their heads enables them with 
 training to walk steadily on the brink of 
 precipices; the same quick apprehen- 
 siveness that makes them timid becomes, 
 under control, a minister to the highest 
 courage, enabling shrinking women to 
 face death, and what is infinitely worse 
 than death — apparently hopeless life. 
 The poet Crashaw remembering the 
 Christian martyrs cries, — 
 
 " Oh that it were as it was wont to be 
 When Thy old friends of fire, all full of Thee, 
 Fought against frowns with smiles, gave glorious 
 
 chase 
 To persecutions, and against the face 
 Of death and fiercest dangers, durst with brave 
 And sober pace march on to meet a grave. 
 On their bold breasts about the world they bore 
 
 Thee, 
 And to the teeth of hell stood up to teach 
 
 Thee ; 
 In centre of their inmost souls they wore Thee, 
 Where racks and torments strived in vain to 
 
 reach Thee." 
 
134 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS 
 
 Even in our own days we have seen a 
 spirit as fine and high among educated 
 men and women. As a child, I saw Gov- 
 ernor Andrew review on Boston Com- 
 mon the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the 
 first black regiment, whose white com- 
 mander, scarcely more than a boy, Colo- 
 nel Robert Gould Shaw, lives to-day in 
 the hearts of Harvard men as the very 
 flower of American knighthood, as the 
 symbol of high idealism, of romantic 
 loyalty to college and to country. Just 
 before the assault on Fort Wagner, a 
 man who believes himself to be the last 
 white man that ever talked with Robert 
 Shaw, carried him a message : 1 — 
 
 " General Strong presents his compli- 
 ments to Colonel Shaw and tells him 
 that he expects the Fifty-fourth to do its 
 duty." 
 
 " Tell General Strong," was the an- 
 
 1 This story is told by President Thwing of 
 Western Reserve University, who heard it from 
 the messenger. 
 
AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE 135 
 
 swer, " that the Fifty-fourth will immor- 
 talize itself" — "and," says the soldier 
 who took the message, " in half an hour 
 he was among the immortals." 
 
 "What has it all been for?" For the 
 knowledge that makes life richer; for 
 the friendship that makes life sweeter ; 
 for the training that brings power to the 
 task which is hard and high ; for the 
 wisdom that suffers and triumphs and 
 is strong ; for the vision that shall light 
 your way like a pillar of fire ; for the 
 truth that shall make you free. 
 
DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL 
 AND COLLEGE 
 
DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL AND 
 COLLEGE 
 
 A PAPER WRITTEN FOR THE CONTEM- 
 PORARY CLUB OF ST. LOUIS 
 
 Nothing makes me feel older than the 
 recollection that I was brought up in 
 the days of corporal punishment at New 
 England public schools. Even now, there 
 are, no doubt, district schools wherein 
 questions of discipline must be settled 
 by a fight in which the best man wins. 
 Sometimes the best man is the teacher, 
 sometimes a pupil ; and, if the pupil 
 wins, the teacher goes. Recently a young 
 woman from Radcliffe College taught a 
 school in which she was obliged to flog 
 boys so large that nothing but gallantry 
 on their part enabled her to do it. Such 
 cases, however, are remote and rural. 
 
140 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 They belong to peaceful country life, and 
 are not deliberately contemplated as part 
 of a school system in thickly settled and 
 civilized regions. Yet I have seen in a 
 New England grammar school the mas- 
 ter struggling with a boy, a settee broken 
 in the struggle, master and boy, pur- 
 suer and pursued, dashing wildly through 
 the school room, a scene of wrath and 
 danger ; and I remember when thirty or 
 forty years ago the people of Cambridge 
 were so excited by a severe case of cor- 
 poral punishment that they hastened the 
 end of all corporal punishment in the 
 public schools. Nor must these specific 
 cases be regarded as evidence that the 
 masters were brutal : in the second case, 
 the master was acknowledged as one of 
 the best in the city ; in the first, he was 
 a man whom, after all these years, I still 
 regard as one of the best teachers I 
 have ever known and one of the kindest. 
 These men were part of a system which 
 we have happily outgrown ; and in at 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 141 
 
 least one of them was an unusual share 
 of that very relation towards pupils 
 which has helped us outgrow it. His 
 predecessor, a wonderfully popular and 
 kind-hearted teacher, had a favorite pun- 
 ishment which he called "driving the 
 nail." When a number of boys were 
 troublesome in any way, — when, for in- 
 stance, they failed badly in their lessons, 
 — he stood them on a platform and 
 made them bend over in a row, each 
 touching the floor with one finger. He 
 then walked the rounds behind them, 
 applying the ruler. In the same city, a 
 good Harvard man who kept a private 
 school used to flog with the ruler the 
 hands of the boys whose fathers paid 
 him. Some of these boys were the most 
 aristocratic in a fine old New England 
 city. One, whom I have seen writhing 
 under the ruler, has since sent his own 
 boy to Groton, where the whole theory 
 of discipline is intensely modern. 
 
 Now, just as in outgrowing the old 
 
142 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 harshness of compulsory education we 
 have sometimes made school work too 
 easy, so in outgrowing corporal punish- 
 ment we have sometimes made school 
 discipline too slack. Mr. Dooley, you 
 remember, describes a scene at a Kin- 
 dergarten in which one child is pulling 
 another's hair, while the teacher observes 
 that the child whose hair is pulled is 
 learning patience, and the child who is 
 pulling the hair is discovering the futility 
 of human endeavor. There is, however, 
 a reasonable theory somewhere ; and, at 
 the risk of being commonplace, I am go- 
 ing to say what seems reasonable to me, 
 and what, so far as my experience goes, 
 has brought the best result. No school 
 or college discipline can be perfect ; but 
 school and college discipline become 
 more nearly perfect according as the 
 teachers possess, beside strong character, 
 unquestioned sympathy with young peo- 
 ple and unquestioned integrity. When I 
 say " unquestioned," I imply tact, cour- 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 143 
 
 tesy, and possibly humor ; for without at 
 least the first of these qualities no sym- 
 pathy can be unquestioned, and without 
 the others some sympathy misses fire. 
 Tact, courtesy, and a sense of humor 
 are in most of us intermittent, and hence 
 some of our failures. Men may be able, 
 upright, and genuinely sympathetic, yet 
 quite unable to make young people know 
 their sympathy or even feel their upright- 
 ness, except on long acquaintance. Such 
 men are, among young people, ineffec- 
 tive. A just teacher may be hated and 
 an unjust teacher loved, if the just man 
 cannot show sympathy at short notice 
 and the unjust man cannot help show- 
 ing it. 
 
 The foundation of school discipline 
 should be laid by parents ; for they can 
 best lead children to expect sympathy 
 and straightforwardness in older peo- 
 ple. One of the surprises to a disciplin- 
 ary officer in a school or a college is 
 the want of confidence between many 
 
144 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 boys and their parents. Instead of being 
 the first persons to whom boys turn 
 in times of trouble, parents are fre- 
 quently the last, — not necessarily be- 
 cause they are unjust or cold-hearted 
 (they may be quite the reverse) but 
 because they have never succeeded in 
 showing their children that kind of sym- 
 pathy to which a son naturally turns. No 
 one who deals with boys at school or 
 college can fail to see how much should 
 be forgiven to those boys whose fathers 
 have never stood toward them in a rela- 
 tion of straightforward affection. 
 
 In teachers of boys ready sympathy 
 and absolute straightforwardness are so 
 important, that I, for one, place them 
 above high scholarship. That brilliant 
 writer, Professor Miinsterberg, justly de- 
 plores the lack of learning in American 
 teachers. If all learned men had the 
 vigor and the magnetism of Professor 
 Miinsterberg, his complaint would have 
 even more weight than it has now. The 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 145 
 
 difficulty is that, though no teacher can 
 have learned too much, yet, the love of 
 learning may unfit a man to be a teacher 
 of boys. A scholar who becomes ab- 
 sorbed in a scholar's life may lose pa- 
 tience with immature minds; and his 
 naturally human feeling toward men may 
 be weakened by his interest in books. In 
 human relations he may fail to rub off 
 what Dryden would call the "rust that 
 he contracted while laying in his stock 
 of learning," and may take his Doctor's 
 degree remote from men and still more 
 remote from boys. The modern school- 
 master's work is vastly more than having 
 or even imparting knowledge. It pene- 
 trates and compasses the boy's whole 
 living ; it cannot be done without enthu- 
 siastic drudgery in small and unlearned 
 things, without a devotion to common- 
 place details, such as characterizes a 
 good mother's care of a young child, 
 without what a man of remote learning 
 regards as wasting time, without a de- 
 
146 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 liberate putting into the background of 
 what people call the development and 
 expansion of one's own self. " I want," 
 young teachers write, " a larger field for 
 my own growth and my own career." 
 Yet often, as Dr. Holmes would say, in 
 the place they already occupy they " rat- 
 tle round ; " they fail to know their far- 
 reaching power where they are for good 
 or for evil, and to know that out of the 
 very things they are shirking now come 
 the growth and the career. As I see 
 every year the number of Doctors of 
 Philosophy who are let loose upon the 
 world, and as I know that there are not 
 nearly enough college places for them 
 all, I fear that the time will come when 
 we shall be in danger not of over- 
 educated but of over- learned school- 
 masters, when we shall overestimate the 
 higher learning in the men who teach 
 our boys. The influence of a schoolmas- 
 ter for good or for evil cannot be escaped. 
 The more learning the better, if in his 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 147 
 
 learning a man remains sweet and sound ; 
 but a schoolmaster who does his work 
 grudgingly, and who feels himself above 
 it, is an unmistakable influence for the 
 bad. It is of vital importance what sort 
 of men our schoolmasters are. Many 
 of our boarding schools — and board- 
 ing schools of high grade — suffer con- 
 stantly from the employment of low-paid 
 younger masters, who if they succeed 
 go elsewhere, and if they fail ought to go 
 elsewhere. Yet, when I say " low-paid," 
 I do not imply that a teacher should do 
 his work for money. The schoolmaster 
 who works for money — whatever his 
 salary — the schoolmaster who forgets 
 what it is to be a boy, the schoolmaster 
 who constantly regrets that he is a school- 
 master and laments his own thwarted 
 career, is unfit for his work. This truth 
 is now recognized in our best private 
 schools. Again and again, these schools 
 reject a scholar for a man who knows not 
 half so much, but who seems a man, — 
 
148 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 an invigorating influence among boys, 
 an influence toward the spirit of leader- 
 ship. 
 
 In one of our best schools for boys 
 the older and stronger pupils are called 
 " prefects," and are put in positions of 
 responsibility which bring them into 
 close relation with the masters. They do 
 not govern the school ; they are subject 
 to the masters : but they are consulted by 
 the masters as best representing the state 
 of mind of the boys in general, and as 
 best interpreting to the boys in general 
 the state of mind of the masters. They 
 are the maturest boys ; and in their re- 
 sponsibility they increase their maturity. 
 As a result, the school best known for its 
 prefect system sends to Harvard College, 
 nearly every year, at least one youth who 
 stands out in his larger surroundings as 
 a leader. In one year three of the class 
 presidents in Harvard College were from 
 that school, which sends us not more 
 than about fifteen boys a year ; and they 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 149 
 
 were presidents of classes in which five 
 or six hundred young fellows had the 
 right to vote for class officers. Moreover, 
 many boys from this school keep in col- 
 lege the attitude of the prefect, the re- 
 cognition that the main object of student 
 and college officer is one and the same, 
 — to do the best that can be done for 
 every student who comes to the Univer- 
 sity; to keep him if he can be made worth 
 keeping, and otherwise, for the good of 
 the place and for his own good, to send 
 him away, though seldom or never with- 
 out a hope of coming back. This coop- 
 eration between scholar and master, be- 
 tween student and professor, is the most 
 striking characteristic of modern school 
 and college discipline. It is not what is 
 called " student government ; " but it is 
 better than student government. So far 
 as my experience goes, the government 
 of a university, or of any large part of 
 a university, cannot with safety be en- 
 trusted to students ; they are harsher 
 
150 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 than their elders, and less just to persons 
 that they dislike. Nor do the students 
 themselves seriously wish for such re- 
 sponsibility and power. In their own 
 enterprises, their athletics and athletic 
 management, their newspapers, their so- 
 cial and debating societies, — in a hun- 
 dred things, — they may develop their 
 leadership and their administrative ca- 
 pacity. In the conduct of the university 
 they should, I believe, have great weight 
 with the administrative officers and have 
 their confidence, but not themselves be 
 administrative officers. 
 
 When I say they should have the con- 
 fidence of the administrative officers, I 
 mean that these officers should so far 
 believe in them as not merely to ask 
 their opinions, but to speak out their own 
 opinions, and lay open to the best of the 
 students whatever can honestly be laid 
 open to them ; that the officers should 
 not hesitate to explain fully the reason 
 for this or that act, relying on their own 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 151 
 
 sincerity and openness, on the good will 
 of the majority, on the hearty coopera- 
 tion of student leaders, and, through stu- 
 dent leaders, of the student body. This 
 good will and cooperation cannot be 
 counted on unless the officers have the 
 qualities I have already mentioned, — 
 sympathy with youth, and straightfor- 
 wardness in all their dealings. I remem- 
 ber one large school at which the desks 
 in the rooms for study were turned away 
 from the platform, so that the master 
 might better watch the boys, while they 
 could not watch him without turning 
 their heads and showing him that they 
 were watching him. What can be ex- 
 pected of boys who are avowedly dis- 
 trusted ? In an open fight the best man 
 may be the master ; but in strategy the 
 boys nearly always win. 
 
 To illustrate the spirit of the prefects, 
 I may recall a few things that have hap- 
 pened in Harvard College. A student 
 had expressed to me some disgust at 
 
152 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 the election of his class president — who 
 had been a prefect — on the ground that 
 the man was not a natural president ; 
 that, though he was a good football 
 player, he was a poor hand at the con- 
 duct of a class meeting, and had little 
 skill in speech. A day or two later the 
 same student said : "I have changed my 
 mind about X. When one of the fellows 
 from his school was drunk in the street 
 to-day, and the crowd had got about him 
 and were guying him, X came round and 
 tried to get him home. When he refused 
 to go, X calmly picked him up and car- 
 ried him through the street to the dor- 
 mitory." Note the incidental advantage 
 in having an athlete for a class presi- 
 dent. 
 
 Another man from this school came to 
 me one day about a clever loafer, whose 
 habits were unsteady, and whom the col- 
 lege authorities had given up as a bad 
 job. Instead of saying, as the conven- 
 tional student of twenty years ago would 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 153 
 
 have said, that the man in question was 
 a brilliant and fine fellow, sadly misun- 
 derstood by the college authorities, he 
 began thus : "I am perfectly disgusted 
 with him. I never thought he ought to 
 be here ; but Y has offered to take him 
 into his room and make him work, while 
 he is working at the law eight hours a 
 day : and I think it is a pretty darned 
 good thing in Y ; and I wish you would 
 let him try it." I remember also a stu- 
 dent whom I called to my office for a 
 poor record in his studies, and who 
 showed incidentally by his appearance 
 and bearing that the radical trouble was 
 in his way of life. The best man I could 
 think of — far better than any college pro- 
 fessor — to take hold of him was a Senior 
 who had been a prefect, and who, through 
 his ability as an athlete and through the 
 general steadiness and helpfulness of his 
 character, was admired by everybody in 
 the College. He had no reason to be 
 especially interested in the fellow I had 
 
154 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 just seen — and certainly he had enough 
 to do : but I knew that the best students 
 and the best men everywhere were al- 
 ways ready to do more ; and I asked 
 him to take this boy in hand. " I don't 
 know that I can make him work," he 
 said ; " there is not much to him." " The 
 main trouble is," said I, " that he is liv- 
 ing wrong." " O, we '11 stop that," he 
 said ; and the boy so far recovered as to 
 finish his work without discredit, and to 
 win his degree. 
 
 This responsibility of the stronger stu- 
 dents for the weaker is a common result 
 of the prefect system, but is not confined 
 to this system. A student from a school 
 where there are no prefects came to me 
 one day in behalf of a fellow whom the 
 administrative board of the College was 
 sending away because he would not work. 
 " I wish," said the student, " you would 
 let me see whether I can do something 
 with him. I think I can make him work." 
 The administrative board told him to try. 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 155 
 
 He made that fellow work as no teacher 
 or combination of teachers could have 
 done ; and he brought him through the 
 year with success. Moreover, he created 
 in him such gratitude and loyalty as I 
 have seldom known in one young man 
 toward another. 
 
 Some time ago several students dis- 
 appeared ; and it was necessary, not for 
 disciplinary reasons, but for human rea- 
 sons, to find them. How to find them 
 was altogether too much for me ; and 
 accordingly I went in the evening to this 
 same man of whom I have just spoken. 
 He was a leader among his fellows and 
 a good scholar also, and was now, in his 
 fourth year, working for the degree of 
 A. M. I found him studying for a final 
 examination the next day ; and the day 
 after that he was to have another final 
 examination. His academic , year had 
 been badly broken both by athletics and 
 by affairs at home ; and those examina- 
 tions were peculiarly important, because 
 
156 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 for the Master's degree high marks are 
 required. He told me at once where he 
 thought the lost men, if they were knock- 
 ing about the city, were likely to be found, 
 to what theatres they might go, and to 
 what restaurants ; and, without a word 
 about his work, he said, " I will go to 
 Boston with you now." When I would 
 not hear of that, he said, " If you want 
 me, telephone out. Meantime I shall be 
 working here. I shall be up grinding 
 until about three o'clock ; I will go over 
 to the Institute building before I go to 
 bed ; and if I can get any news of them 
 there, I will look out for them." 
 
 Of the three men whose help I have 
 just recounted, two were class presidents 
 and first marshals ; the other was second 
 marshal in the same class with one of 
 the two. Now when men who are elected 
 by their fellow students to the highest 
 class offices feel as these men felt, there 
 is great hope for the discipline of the Col- 
 lege. Half the problem, indeed, is solved. 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 157 
 
 Not long ago I had another extraor- 
 dinary instance of this sort of responsi- 
 bility among students, — more extraor- 
 dinary than any I have named because 
 the person who felt it must have been 
 younger than the person toward whom 
 he felt it. The latter, however, was with- 
 out experience, and seemed to need pro- 
 tection from an adventuress who was 
 ruining his life. 
 
 When I say that college officers should 
 sympathize with youth, I do not mean 
 that they should sympathize with juve- 
 nility, though they should understand it ; 
 I mean that they should know and feel 
 the peculiar strain to which students are 
 subjected. I have heard men speak lightly 
 of college temptation. "The truth is," 
 they say, " there is no place in the world 
 where temptation to evil is so slight 
 as in college, because there is no place 
 in the world where temptation to ex- 
 cellence is so strong." It is true that 
 temptation to excellence is strong, that 
 
158 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 there is no place in the world where 
 higher ideals are set before young men, 
 or where there are more forces which, by 
 interesting them in good things, may 
 drive out bad ones ; but it is also true, 
 and must be constantly borne in mind, 
 that the step from school to college or 
 from home to college is often the first 
 step into the world. In a large collegiate 
 school, such as Exeter or Andover, the 
 boys get the same kind of temptation 
 and the same kind of discipline that 
 other boys get in college ; but for most 
 boys college has — in the beginning, at 
 any rate — certain peculiar temptations. 
 Wherever hundreds or thousands of young 
 men are together, with their first responsi- 
 bility for money, and in their first entrance 
 to the world, vice is almost thrown at 
 them. In a modern college, moreover, 
 a student has much more freedom as 
 to his time in general, and his evenings 
 in particular, than at home or at school ; 
 and the remoteness of the work which 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 159 
 
 by and by he must do in the world, 
 and the uncertainty what it is to be, 
 may prevent him from seeing the rela- 
 tion between industry now and success 
 in later life. A boy who goes into an 
 office may have his evenings free, and 
 may have all sorts of temptations ; but 
 he must go to a certain place at a certain 
 time — and at a pretty early time in the 
 morning — or something happens. By 
 evening his work may have made him 
 healthily tired ; and he knows that his 
 advancement in business — and perhaps 
 his whole career — will depend on the 
 faithfulness and the eagerness with which 
 he does the work immediately before 
 him. All this the ordinary college boy 
 does not see. He is bewildered, even by 
 the good opportunities which are set be- 
 fore him, not one tenth part of which he 
 has time to use. Now this bewilderment 
 demands in the college officers who meet 
 him no end of sympathy, along with a 
 certain sternness of resolution. 
 
160 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 I have spoken of the larger side of 
 discipline. Noise in dormitories, and 
 pranks too puerile for college students, 
 should seldom be treated as grave of- 
 fences. If possible, a student should be 
 taught to see their puerility. Now and 
 then, discipline may require the removal 
 of a youth prominently engaged in them ; 
 but a sharp line should be drawn be- 
 tween such offences and dishonesty or 
 vice or persistent loafing, or what Pro- 
 fessor Shaler has called "miscellaneous 
 worthlessness." 
 
 In all relations with students school 
 and college officers should, as I have im- 
 plied, be as open as they can be without 
 violating the confidence of other men. 
 In particular, no school or college officer 
 should refuse to be open from the notion 
 that openness means loss of dignity. 
 Dignity is most easily lost by him who 
 thinks too much about it; nor is the 
 dignity of any two men alike. President 
 Eliot's, for example, differs materially 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 161 
 
 from President Roosevelt's ; and we can 
 hardly imagine their swapping : but each 
 of these gentlemen has in his own way 
 extraordinary power over men. In one 
 important school the headmaster, a man 
 of forty or more, is the right fielder of 
 the baseball team; and the masters, in 
 general, are intimate friends and play- 
 mates of the boys, who do not hesitate 
 in play hours to call them by nicknames 
 to their faces. This state of things would 
 not do for every school ; yet I know no 
 school whose pupils come to college with 
 more courteous manners. Again, it is 
 never in any school or college undigni- 
 fied for a teacher to explain any act of 
 his that for a boy seems to need explana- 
 tion. If in his explanation he reaches a 
 point where he must betray other people 
 or stop, he need only say, " I am sorry, 
 but I have no right to go further." Again, 
 it is never undignified for a teacher to 
 say in the class-room, " I do not know ; " 
 and many a teacher loses the respect of 
 
162 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 his pupils from unwillingness to admit 
 that he is fallible. 
 
 The cultivation of openness on both 
 sides is closely connected with what 
 seems the slowness of some reforms in 
 our larger colleges. A slow reform is 
 much better than an evaded or violated 
 prohibition ; and the choice is often be- 
 tween these two. The policy of Harvard 
 University, for example, is to test every- 
 thing by daylight. Instead of forbidding 
 certain initiation practices, which it be- 
 lieves to be foolish ai\pl occasionally 
 cruel, but which it knows no power could 
 stop if the societies were secret societies, 
 it does all it can to lead the societies into 
 publicity, so that even the initiations 
 may stand public scrutiny. Public opin- 
 ion has already, in the better colleges, 
 suppressed hazing. The authorities can 
 seldom suppress it: they can merely 
 clean up afterward ; and often they may 
 send away the wrong men. 
 
 As an example of open relation be- 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 163 
 
 tween administrative officers and stu- 
 dents, I give you a dialogue that oc- 
 curred in a strong Quaker college. 
 " Jones," said the president, who wastes 
 few words, "I have reason to believe 
 thee is a thief and a liar." " No, Mr. 
 President," said Jones, " I am a liar ; but 
 I am not a thief." (It is interesting, by the 
 way, to consider where this leaves Jones.) 
 Above all things, a college officer should 
 try not to be the kind of man of whom 
 the late Dr. Carroll Everett said, "He 
 presents different aspects of a truth to 
 different persons." I cannot say with 
 Mark Twain that I know honesty to be 
 the best policy because I have tried 
 both ; but I know it to be the best policy 
 because I have seen both. In a college 
 that employs no spies, the student him- 
 self is treated as the greatest living au- 
 thority on his own conduct ; and, when 
 he is questioned about it, he is expected, 
 as a gentleman, to tell the truth. "Is 
 it fair," people sometimes ask, "this 
 
164 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 expecting a man to bear witness against 
 himself?" Much fairer than expecting 
 others to bear witness against him. He 
 understands the right of the college to 
 call him to account. Again and again 
 I have marvelled at the frankness of 
 students when squarely asked what they 
 have or have not done, at the persist- 
 ency of the feeling that, even if they 
 have cheated more or less, they cannot, 
 as gentlemen, lie when talking face to 
 face. Of course there are exceptions, 
 often in part the fault of the college offi- 
 cer or the result of his want of tact ; yet 
 in general, the frankness of students, 
 even in bad things, is refreshing. Not 
 long since, a man whose college work 
 was done but who had not yet his degree 
 said to me, " I must leave this place. I 
 have got in with fellows who have more 
 money than I and live more expensively 
 than I ; and I have taken to drinking. I 
 must get out into the country." " Temp- 
 tation," as Thackeray says, "is an ob- 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 165 
 
 sequious servant, who has no objections 
 to the country ; " but this man's imme- 
 diate temptation lay among certain city 
 associates. " I had been drinking too 
 much," said another student, " and when 
 the proctor spoke to me I think I in- 
 sulted him. I don't know what I said ; I 
 only know that at the time it appeared 
 to me amusing." Another student, who 
 wished to go away for a recess a day 
 earlier than the college rules allowed, re- 
 marked, " It 's only cutting one lecture." 
 When I explained the difficulty of keep- 
 ing men till the end of the term, and the 
 principle involved in letting a single one 
 go, he exclaimed, "But the lecture's in 
 such a darned silly course!" an improper 
 remark, no doubt ; yet the fact that he 
 spoke out went far toward making up 
 for the impropriety. 
 
 Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higgin- 
 son once said of his own college days 
 that a student seen walking with an in- 
 structor lost caste at once. There has 
 
166 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 been no more important change in col- 
 lege life of late than the change in the 
 relation of student and instructor. In 
 nearly every respect the struggle for an 
 honest and friendly relation must be suc- 
 cessful ; but success comes slowest and 
 most doubtfully in questions of honesty 
 in written work. Even here a person 
 whose written work is dishonest may be 
 perfectly straightforward in confessing 
 what he has done, — might go to the 
 stake rather than deny it. The discour- 
 aging thing is that he should do it at all. 
 Equally discouraging is his defence. He 
 admits that, looked at critically, he has 
 missed an educational opportunity ; but 
 the loss is his only, and need not worry 
 the Faculty : if detected, he cannot ex- 
 pect credit for his composition ; but to 
 suspend him is monstrous. He himself 
 affirms that he did what everybody does ; 
 that he "had to hand in something," 
 was not well, and was short of time ; 
 that his name on the theme is a mere 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 167 
 
 label, quite non-committal as to the 
 question of authorship ; perhaps that he 
 copied from a book which the instruc- 
 tor " could not help knowing," and that 
 therefore he could mean no deceit (he 
 "agreed with Thackeray's ideas and 
 could not improve on his language "). 
 He adds that he learned to "crib" at 
 school. Soon he is reinforced by a father 
 who assures the Dean that the young 
 man is the very soul of honor, and that 
 this " breach of the rules " is the thought- 
 lessness of a mere boy, which will never 
 show itself again. Like many students 
 not interested in their studies, he fails 
 to see, first, that the greater part of the 
 dishonesty of the world, except that of 
 professionally dishonest persons, whom 
 we, since we deal with amateurs, may 
 disregard, is committed by men under 
 pressure, by men who feel that they have 
 not time or resources for honesty ; and 
 he fails also to see the danger of fool- 
 ing with his standard of truth. Suppose 
 
168 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 a college officer has promised to write 
 something for a college paper. No 
 money is involved and no glory. He is 
 hard pressed for time, and hard pressed 
 with excellent reasons — much better 
 than those of the idle student. Accord- 
 ingly he copies something from another 
 writer and prints it as his own. If dis- 
 covered, he will justly be regarded by 
 every student as a dishonest man ; yet, 
 clear as the student's view would be in 
 the case I have supposed, there is a real 
 difficulty in educating the public opinion 
 of a college to honesty in written work, — 
 and in excuses for the mild indisposition 
 with which some students are often and 
 perfunctorily afflicted. No penalty has 
 proved satisfactory. Our common pen- 
 alty in Cambridge for dishonesty in 
 written work is suspension ; but suspen- 
 sion is more and more unsatisfactory as 
 years go by. In old times a suspended 
 student was rusticated, as it was called. 
 Some country minister took him in 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 169 
 
 charge and heard his lessons : but, with 
 the complexity of instruction at Ameri- 
 can universities to-day, with the number 
 of courses that require excellent labo- 
 ratory facilities and extensive libraries, 
 old-fashioned rustication becomes impos- 
 sible ; and the suspended student is in 
 the position of a man obliged to do a 
 certain piece of work by the very au- 
 thorities who have cut off his opportu- 
 nity of doing it. I suppose we must wait 
 in this matter for the slowly developed 
 sense of documentary honesty among 
 students. The " honor system," so called, 
 is as yet, I believe, experimental. What 
 worries me about putting students on 
 their honor in all matters of written work 
 is the fact that they cheat most in those 
 exercises in which they are put on their 
 honor now. 
 
 After all, the most serious question of 
 discipline in the college of to-day is how 
 to get from our students intellectual work. 
 Want of responsibility to work rather 
 
170 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 than radical dishonesty is at the root of 
 such dishonest acts as I have described. 
 In the attitude toward work a consid- 
 erable number of students are still boys 
 and not men. It is only in athletics that 
 some of them recognize the flimsiness of 
 excuses, the necessity of hard training, 
 the responsibility of duty day by day, the 
 meanness of the " quitter." As to excuses, 
 I have heard a college officer whose busi- 
 ness it is to pass on them described as 
 " a man you lie to and get mad with for 
 not believing you ; " and this definition 
 shows how dexterously the unthinking 
 student uses in college morals a double 
 standard, and how flexible he is in trans- 
 forming himself from man to boy and 
 from boy to man, according to his own 
 immediate advantage. The most search- 
 ing temptation of a Freshman when he 
 first finds himself turned loose in a uni- 
 versity is the temptation to idleness. 
 Some Freshmen act as if in entering col- 
 lege they had scaled the mountain of 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 171 
 
 life and had nothing to do but to picnic 
 on the summit. Their natural desire to 
 get into this or that club, their knowledge 
 that they cannot get into it without wide 
 acquaintance, and their belief that wide 
 acquaintance involves free use of social 
 hours at all times of the day, lead them 
 to loafing. Thus far the influence of the 
 club is bad, though later a clubman may 
 be upheld in his work and driven to his 
 work by those members of the club who 
 see his danger. The radical difficulty 
 about work among students comes, in 
 part, from the prevalent theory of educa- 
 tion through which boys and young men 
 have things done for them, sometimes 
 for their amusement, sometimes for their 
 information, instead of being taught to 
 do things for themselves. I lately talked 
 with an intelligent and delightful Sopho- 
 more who had excused himself for ab- 
 sence on the ground that he had gone 
 with a sick companion to a " phizician." 
 I cheerfully accepted his excuse, but told 
 
172 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 him that I did not like to see him spell 
 physician in that way. " I know," he re- 
 plied, " I did n't know how to spell that 
 word : mamma was n't at home ; and I 
 did n't know." Yet this boy came from 
 a school recognized as among the best, 
 and from educated parents ; and even 
 in Boston, mamma, when she goes out, 
 leaves the dictionary behind her. Possi- 
 bly he was like the other student who 
 said, " What 's the use of looking in the 
 dictionary for a word if you don't know 
 the letter it begins with ? " 
 
 A large part of the discipline of a col- 
 lege, in the widest sense of the word 
 discipline, lies in the training toward 
 power for the emergencies and the strains 
 of life. Even the knowledge a student 
 acquires is of value chiefly to that end. 
 Now nobody ever got power through 
 being amused and having things done 
 for him. This principle is, as I have inti- 
 mated, recognized in athletics ; and hence 
 comes much of the value of athletics. 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 173 
 
 In school or college no discipline is effec- 
 tive which does not emphasize work, the 
 duty of boy or man to do whatever is 
 before him, and by doing it to get inter- 
 ested in it. " We have no serious diffi- 
 culty in the conduct of our boys," said the 
 master of a new school ; "we have found 
 them courteous, obedient, well disposed ; 
 but it has taken us weeks to make them 
 understand that the first thing to do 
 is their work." This same master has 
 devised a seal for the school, a shield 
 adorned with a hammer and an anvil ; 
 and round about the shield are the words, 
 " Veritas, Fides, Labor." The difficulty 
 that he finds we find in college — and 
 in a higher degree — because in college 
 the students are less closely supervised, 
 and need not recite every day in every- 
 thing they are supposed to study. 
 
 What I have said is by no means 
 inconsistent with the advocacy of an 
 elective system, since every study, if it 
 is to have more than a mere cultivating 
 
174 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 value, demands solid work. Not long 
 ago the Administrative Board of Harvard 
 College sent away eight or ten Fresh- 
 men for loafing. Every one of these 
 Freshmen was quite capable of doing his 
 work ; every one, I believe, had come 
 from what we must call a good school ; 
 many of them were unusually attractive 
 boys, and by no means bad boys ; not 
 one of them would heed the warnings of 
 the college authorities ; and, with great 
 tribulation, they left us. Every one left 
 us with the understanding that, though 
 the door was shut, he might by good 
 work outside, and by certain examina- 
 tions which are offered every year, open it 
 again. It is true of most of these Fresh- 
 men that nothing in their college life 
 became them like the leaving it. No 
 one could talk with them and not feel an 
 intense personal interest in them as mis- 
 guided boys, blind boys, whose eyes could 
 be opened by nothing but adversity. 
 "If," said the late Professor Dunbar, "a 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 175 
 
 dean regards himself as something more 
 than a prosecuting officer, it is interesting 
 to see how you can help some of these 
 fellows through ; " and he would have 
 been slow to deny the helpfulness of tem- 
 porary adversity. Let me say once more 
 that the root of all discipline, whether dis- 
 cipline for efficiency in life or discipline 
 for the development of character, for the 
 resistance of temptation, is in steady, 
 whole-hearted work, whether the subject 
 of the work is at first sight alluring or 
 forbidding. 
 
 I do not believe in crowding children 
 with study. The hours of work may 
 be short; and for many children they 
 should be short. I find myself strangely 
 at variance with the men who lead the 
 educational thought of to-day ; though I 
 believe more strongly than they in pre- 
 scribing work for boys, I do not believe 
 that American boys should go to college 
 much earlier than they go now. Many 
 writers on education overlook, I think, 
 
176 DISCIPLINE IN 
 
 the time lost in the mere sicknesses of 
 childhood. I should rather, for instance, 
 have my boy go to college a year later 
 than force him to injure his eyes by 
 hard work after measles. Again, what- 
 ever may be true of European children, 
 the American child lives in an atmos- 
 phere peculiarly stimulating, peculiarly 
 dangerous to the nervous system. The 
 over-stimulating of ambitious children 
 during the time of rapid bodily growth, 
 especially during the marked physical 
 changes which lead from youth to man- 
 hood or womanhood, may damage the 
 children and the race. Not long ago I 
 heard a professor, himself a German, say 
 with pride that in the summer he gave 
 his boy of fifteen a quarter of a dollar 
 for every morning that he got up at four 
 to study, and that the boy used his first 
 dollar in buying an alarm clock. I doubt 
 whether our American children will ever 
 be physically and intellectually mature 
 so early as the German children or the 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 177 
 
 French ; but while they work, they should 
 understand that work is to be done ener- 
 getically and thoroughly. 
 
 One thing more : we cannot discipline 
 boys or young men by trying to tell them 
 all the things they should not do. The 
 number of definite prohibitions should, I 
 believe, be small. Nobody can cover the 
 ground. In a college which used to make 
 some small attempt at covering it, I have 
 heard a gambler defended by a clergy- 
 man on the ground that gambling was 
 not prohibited by the rules. 
 
 To me the conclusion of the whole 
 matter is this : The best discipline, 
 whether of school or of college, is that 
 which relies on the understanding be- 
 tween pupil and teacher that the objects 
 of pupil and teacher are one and the 
 same ; a discipline based on sympathy 
 with all the healthy interests of youth — 
 not on weak compassion for the un- 
 healthy temptations, though there may 
 be a sort of bracing compassion, even 
 
178 DISCIPLINE IN ' 
 
 for them ; a discipline which allows last- 
 ing friendship with pupils who must 
 be dismissed or expelled ; a discipline 
 which relies on cooperation, wherever 
 such cooperation is reasonable, with the 
 leaders among the pupils, and through 
 the leaders with the great body of the 
 pupils ; a discipline based on absolute 
 straightforwardness and perfect courtesy 
 — for perfect courtesy is consistent with 
 absolute straightforwardness ; a disci- 
 pline which counts it no loss of dignity 
 for an instructor or a master to explain 
 his point of view ; a discipline which in- 
 sists that there is no training without 
 work, and that the work must not be 
 done by the trainer only ; a discipline 
 which remembers that it is want of train- 
 ing which temporarily wrecks many a 
 Freshman, and makes his evolution into 
 energetic manhood discouragingly slow. 
 I believe, further, that in every school 
 and in every college there should be an 
 effort from the start to make a youth 
 
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 179 
 
 imbibe that wonderful tonic called school 
 or college spirit ; to make him feel that 
 from the moment he enters a school or a 
 college he has become forever a part of 
 it, one of its makers, and that through- 
 out his life, wherever he goes, he takes 
 with him, dragging or exalting it, as the 
 case may be, the name of his school or 
 of his college. Once get a deep, high 
 loyalty, and the problem of discipline is 
 gone. 
 
THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
 LIFE 
 
THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
 LIFE 
 
 A TALK TO BOYS ON THE POINT OF 
 ENTERING COLLEGE 
 
 In a certain sense, college is the place 
 for mistakes. In college a young man 
 tests his strength, and, while testing it, 
 is protected from the results of failure far 
 more effectively than he will ever be pro- 
 tected afterward. The youth who is de- 
 termined to succeed in public speaking 
 may stand up again and again in a col- 
 lege debating club, may fail again and 
 again, and through his failure may rise 
 to success ; whereas if he should put off 
 his efforts until some political campaign 
 had called him to the stump, no audience 
 would listen to him, or even let him go 
 
 — 
 
184 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 on. " The mistakes that make us men," 
 says Dr. Lyman Abbott, " are better than 
 the accuracies that keep us children." 
 Yet even in college there are mistakes 
 by which the career of a happy, well- 
 meaning youth is suddenly darkened ; 
 and though he may learn out of the very 
 bitterness of his experience, he is never 
 quite the same again. 
 
 All boys with a fair chance in the world 
 have at their best a common motive, — 
 to be of some use, to lead active, efficient 
 lives, to do something worth doing, and 
 to do it well, to become men on whom 
 people instinctively and not in vain rely. 
 Men and women may be divided roughly 
 into two classes, — those who are "there," 
 and those who are " not there." The 
 " not there " people may be clever, 
 may be what is called " good company," 
 may have, even after you know them 
 pretty well, a good deal of personal 
 charm ; but once know them through 
 and through, and you have no use for 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 185 
 
 them. The " there " people may be un- 
 polished, unmagnetic, without social 
 charm ; but once understand that they 
 are " there, " and you get help and com- 
 fort from the mere knowledge that there 
 are such people in the world. Every boy 
 in his heart of hearts admires a man who 
 is " there," and wishes to be like him ; 
 but not every boy (and here is the sad 
 part of it) understands that to be " there" 
 is the result of a long process, the result 
 of training day by day and year by year, 
 precisely as to be a sure man (I do not 
 say a brilliant man) in the pitcher's box 
 or behind the bat is the result of long 
 training. A single decision or indecision, 
 an act of a moment or a moment's fail- 
 ure to act, may turn a whole life awry ; 
 but the weakness of that moment is only 
 the expression of a weakness which for 
 months or for years has been undermin- 
 ing the character, or at best the result of 
 a failure to train body, mind, and heart 
 for the emergencies of life. 
 
1 86 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 In this training we can learn, if we 
 will, from other people's experience ; and 
 although boys are loath to accept any- 
 body's experience but their own, and are 
 not always wise enough to accept that, 
 it is yet worth while to show them some 
 dangers which other boys have met or 
 have failed to meet, that they may not 
 be taken unawares. A great man, almost 
 too far above the temptations of the aver- 
 age boy to understand them, has con- 
 demned talking to boys and young men 
 about temptation ; he would fill their 
 minds with good things: but there are 
 no boys whose minds are so full of good 
 things that a temptation cannot get in 
 edgewise. An absorbing interest in a 
 good something or a good somebody 
 holds back and may finally banish the 
 worst temptations ; it is quite as impor- 
 tant to interest boys in good things as 
 to take away their interest in bad ones : 
 but when all is said, the lightest hearted 
 boy who comes to manhood must come 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 187 
 
 to it " through sorrows and through 
 scars." 
 
 To many boys the beginning of col- 
 lege life is the first step into the world. 
 Its dangers are much like those of other 
 first steps into the world, yet with this 
 difference : the college boy has the ad- 
 vantage of living where ideals are noble, 
 and the disadvantage (if he is weak or 
 immature) of living where he need not 
 get heartily tired day after day in keep- 
 ing long, inevitable hours of work. This 
 disadvantage is indeed a privilege, but a 
 privilege which like all privileges is bad 
 unless accorded to a responsible being. 
 To discipline one's self, to hold one's self 
 responsible, is ever so much better than 
 to be disciplined, to be held responsible 
 by somebody else ; but it is a task for a 
 man. Naturally enough, then, the mis- 
 takes and the sins of college life are 
 commonly rooted in boyish irresponsi- 
 bility. 
 
 The average youth takes kindly to the 
 
188 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 notion that in the first year or two at 
 college he need not be bound by the or- 
 dinary restraints of law-abiding men and 
 women. "Boys will be boys," even to 
 the extent of sowing wild oats. Time 
 enough to settle down by and by ; mean- 
 while the world is ours. A year or so 
 of lawlessness will be great fun, and will 
 give us large experience ; and even if 
 we shock some good people, we are but 
 doing the traditional thing. A youth 
 who feels thus takes prompt offence if 
 treated, as he says, " like a kid ; " yet he 
 may do things so low that any honest 
 child would despise them. Nor is this 
 true of one sex only. I have heard a mar- 
 ried woman recount with satisfaction her 
 two nights' work in stealing a sign when 
 she was at college ; and her father, a col- 
 lege man, listened with sympathetic joy. 
 I have known a youth who held a large 
 scholarship in money to steal, or — as he 
 preferred to say — " pinch," an instru- 
 ment worth several dollars from the lab- 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 189 
 
 oratory where he was trusted as he would 
 have been trusted in a gentleman's par- 
 lor. I have even heard of students who 
 bought signs, and hung them up in their 
 rooms to get the reputation of stealing 
 them. Surely there is nothing in college 
 life to make crime a joke. A street 
 "mucker" sneaks into a student's room 
 and steals half a dozen neckties (for 
 which the student has not paid), and 
 nothing is too hard for him ; a student 
 steals a poor laundry man's sign for fun : 
 may a gentleman do without censure 
 what sends a "mucker" to jail? If the 
 gentleman is locked up in the evening 
 to be taken before the judge in the morn- 
 ing, his friends are eager to get him out. 
 Yet in one night of ascetic meditation 
 he may learn more than in his whole 
 previous life of his relation to the rights 
 of his fellow men. One of the first les- 
 sons in college life is an axiom : Crime 
 is crime, and a thief is a thief, even at an 
 institution of learning. The college thief 
 
190 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 has, it is true, a different motive from his 
 less favored brother ; but is the motive 
 better ? Is there not at the root of it a 
 misunderstanding of one man's relation 
 to another, so selfish that, in those who 
 ought to be the flower of American 
 youth, it would be hardly conceivable if 
 we did not see it with our own eyes? 
 People sometimes wonder at the de- 
 sire of towns to tax colleges, instead 
 of helping them. A small number of 
 students who steal signs, and refuse to 
 pay bills unless the tradesman's man- 
 ner pleases them, may well account for 
 it all. 
 
 As there is nothing in college life to 
 justify a thief, so there is nothing in it 
 to justify a liar. College boys in their 
 relation to one another are quite as truth- 
 ful as other people ; but some of them 
 regard their dealings with college author- 
 ities as some men regard horse-trades. 
 We know them capable of distinguish- 
 ing truth from falsehood, since their 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 191 
 
 standard of integrity for their teachers 
 is sensitively high. Their standard for 
 themselves is part of that conceit, of 
 that blind incapacity for the Golden 
 Rule, which is often characteristic of 
 early manhood. To this blindness most 
 books about school and college life con- 
 tribute. Even the healthier of these 
 books stir the reader's sympathy in be- 
 half of the gentlemanly, happy-go-lucky 
 youth who pulls wool over the eyes of 
 his teachers, and deepen the impression 
 that college boys live in a fairyland of 
 charming foolery, and are no more mor- 
 ally responsible than the gods of Olym- 
 pus. Plainly such a theory of college 
 life, even if no one holds to it long, 
 nurses a selfishness and an insincerity 
 which may outlast the theory that has 
 nourished them. The man who has his 
 themes written for him, or who cribs at 
 examinations, or who excuses himself 
 from college lectures because of " sick- 
 ness " in order to rest after or before a 
 
192 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 dance, may be clever and funny to read 
 about ; but his cleverness and " funni- 
 ness" are not many degrees removed 
 from those of the forger and the im- 
 postor, who may also be amusing in 
 fiction. 
 
 Another bad thing in the substitution 
 of excuses, even fairly honest excuses, 
 for work is the weakening effect of it on 
 everyday life. The work of the world is 
 in large measure done by people whose 
 heads and throats and stomachs do not 
 feel just right, but who go about their 
 daily duties, and in doing them forget 
 their heads and throats and stomachs. 
 He who is to be "there" as a man can- 
 not afford to cosset himself as a boy. A 
 well-known railroad man has remarked 
 that he knows in his business two kinds 
 of men : one, with a given piece of work 
 to do before a given time, comes back at 
 the appointed hour and says, " That job 
 is done. I found unexpected difficulties, 
 but it is done ; " the other comes back 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 193 
 
 with "several excellent reasons" why 
 the job is not done. " I have," says the 
 railroad man, " no use for the second of 
 these men." Nor has any business man 
 use for him. The world is pretty cold 
 toward chronic invalids and excuse- 
 mongers. " If you are too sick to be 
 here regularly," it says, " I am sorry for 
 you, but I shall have to employ a health- 
 ier man." You will find, by the way, 
 that it is easier to attend all your re- 
 citations than to attend half or three- 
 quarters of them. Once open the ques- 
 tion of not going, and you see " several 
 excellent reasons " for staying at home. 
 Routine, as all mature men know, stead- 
 ies nerves, and, when used intelligently, 
 adds contentment to life. 
 
 I have spoken of lying to college offi- 
 cers, and of excuses which, if I may use 
 an undergraduate expression, " may be 
 right, but are not stylish right." I come 
 next to the question of responsibility to 
 father and mother in matters of truth and 
 
194 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 falsehood. One of the evils from vice of 
 all sorts at college is the lying that re- 
 sults from it. Shame and fear, half dis- 
 guised as a desire not to worry parents, 
 cut off many a father and mother from 
 knowing what they have a right to 
 know, and what they, if confided in, 
 might remedy. I have seldom seen a 
 student in serious trouble who did not 
 say — honestly enough, I presume — that 
 he cared less for his own mortification 
 than for his father's and mother's. As 
 a rule, one of his parents is threatened 
 with nervous prostration, or oppressed 
 with business cares, or has a weak heart 
 which, as the son argues, makes the 
 receipt of bad news dangerous. Filial 
 affection, which has been so dormant as 
 to let the student do those things which 
 would distress his parents most, awakes 
 instantly at the thought that the parents 
 must learn what he has done. The two 
 severest rebukes of a certain gentle mo- 
 ther were : " You ought to have meant 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 195 
 
 not to," and " You ought to have been 
 sorry beforehand." 
 
 Many a student, knowing that the 
 college must communicate with his fa- 
 ther, will not nerve himself to the duty 
 and the filial kindness of telling his fa- 
 ther first. I remember a boy who was to 
 be suspended for drunkenness, and who 
 was urged to break the news to his fa- 
 ther before the official letter went. 
 
 " You don't know my father," he said. 
 " My father is a very severe man, and I 
 can't tell him." 
 
 " The only thing you can do for him," 
 was the answer, " is to let him feel that 
 you are able and willing to tell him first, 
 — that you give him your confidence." 
 
 " Oh, you don't know him," said the 
 boy again. 
 
 "Is there any 'out' about your father?" 
 
 "No " (indignantly) ! " You would 
 respect him and admire him ; but he 
 is a very severe man." 
 
 4< Then he has a right to hear and 
 
ig6 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 to hear first from you. You cannot 
 help him more than by telling him, or 
 hurt him more than by hiding the truth 
 from him." 
 
 A day or two later the boy came back 
 to the college office. " My father is a 
 brick ! " he said. In his confession he had 
 learned for the first time how much his 
 father cared for him. 
 
 A young man, intensely curious about 
 the wickedness of life, is easily persuaded 
 that the first business of a college student 
 is "to know life," — that is, to know the 
 worst things in it ; and, in the pursuit of 
 wisdom, he sets out in the evening, with 
 others, merely to see the vice of a great 
 city. He calls at a house where he meets 
 bad men and bad women, and eats and 
 drinks with them. What he eats and 
 drinks he does not know; but in the 
 morning he is still there, with a life stain 
 upon him, and needing more than ever 
 before to confide in father or mother or 
 in some good physician. Yet the people 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 197 
 
 who can help him most, the people also 
 in whom he must confide or be false to 
 them, are the very people he avoids. 
 
 Again, it is hard to prove by cold logic 
 that gambling is wrong. A young man 
 says to himself, " If I wish to spend a dol- 
 lar in this form of amusement, why should 
 I not ? I know perfectly well what I am 
 about I am playing with money not play- 
 ing for it In some countries — in Eng- 
 land, for example — clergymen, and good 
 people generally, play whist with shilling 
 stakes, and would not think of playing it 
 without." So of vice he says, "No man 
 knows human nature until he has seen 
 the dark side. I shall be a broader man 
 if I know these things ; and some phy- 
 sicians recommend the practice of them 
 in moderation." When we say, " Lead 
 us not into temptation," we forget that 
 one of the worst temptations in the world 
 is the temptation to be led into tempta- 
 tion, — the temptation to gratify vulgar 
 curiosity, and to see on what thin ice we 
 
198 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 can walk. No man is safe ; no man can 
 tell what he shall do, or what others will 
 do to him, if he once enters a gambling 
 house or a brothel. The history of every 
 city, and the history of every college, will 
 prove what I say. There is no wisdom 
 in looking at such places, — nothing but 
 greenness and folly. The difficulty with 
 gambling is, as some one has said, that 
 " it eats the heart out of a man," — that 
 imperceptibly the playing with slips into 
 the playing for, until without gambling 
 life seems tame : and the difficulty with 
 vice is that it involves physical danger 
 of the most revolting kind ; that it kills 
 self-respect ; that it brings with it either 
 shamelessness or a miserable dishonesty 
 for decency's sake ; and that it is a breach 
 of trust to those who are, or who are 
 to be, the nearest and the dearest, — a 
 breach of trust to father and mother, and 
 to the wife and children, who may seem 
 remote and unreal, but who to most 
 young men are close at hand. By the 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 199 
 
 time a boy goes to college, he may well 
 feel responsibility to the girl whom some 
 day he will respect and love, and who, 
 he hopes, will respect and love him. A 
 boy's or man's sense of fair play should 
 show him that it is effrontery in a man 
 who has been guilty of vice with women 
 to ask for a pure girl's love. The time is 
 only too likely to come when a young 
 fellow who has yielded to the tremendous 
 sudden temptation that is thrown at him 
 in college and in the world, will face the 
 bitter question, " Can I tell the truth 
 about myself to the girl I love ? If I tell 
 it, I may justly lose her ; if I do not tell 
 it, my whole life may be a frightened lie." 
 
 " Who is the Happy Husband ? He 
 Who, scanning his unwedded life, 
 Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 
 'T was faithful to his future wife." 
 
 Not merely the curiosity which listens 
 to false arguments about life and wisdom, 
 but the awful loneliness of a boy far from 
 home, may lead to vice and misery. The 
 
200 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 boy who is used to girls at home, and 
 who knows in his new surroundings no 
 such girls as he knew at home, no such 
 girls as his sisters' friends, is only too 
 likely to scrape an easy acquaintance 
 with some of those inferior girls by whom 
 every student is seen in a kind of glamour, 
 and to whom acquaintance with students 
 is the chief excitement of life. With little 
 education, much giddy vanity, and no 
 refinement, these girls may yet possess a 
 sort of cheap attractiveness. They are, 
 besides, easy to get acquainted with, easy 
 to be familiar with, and interesting sim- 
 ply because they are girls — for the time 
 being, the only accessible girls. I need 
 not dwell on the embarrassment, the sor- 
 row, and even the crime, in which such 
 friendships may end; but I may empha- 
 size the responsibility of every man, 
 young or old, towards every woman. 
 " Every free and generous spirit," said 
 Milton, " ought to be born a knight." 
 It is the part of a man to protect these 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 201 
 
 girls against themselves. If they know 
 no better than to hint to a student that 
 they should like to see his room some 
 evening, he knows better than to take 
 the hint, — better than to suffer them 
 through him to do what, though it may 
 not stain their character, may yet de- 
 stroy their good name. No girls stand 
 more in need of chivalry than these vain 
 girls, not yet bad, who flutter about the 
 precincts of a college. 
 
 Students know what responsibility 
 means ; but their views of it are dis- 
 torted. They demand it of their elders ; 
 in certain parts of athletics they demand 
 it of themselves. Which is the worse 
 breach of faith, to sit up a quarter of 
 an hour later than your athletic trainer 
 allows, or to betray the trust that father 
 and mother have put in you, to gamble 
 away or to spend on low women the 
 money sent you for your term-bill, and 
 to cover all with a lie ? 
 
 It may be from a dim notion of these 
 
202 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 eccentricities in undergraduate judgment 
 that many boys cultivate irresponsibility 
 with a view to social success. Social am- 
 bition is the strongest power in many a 
 student's college life, a power compared 
 with which all the rules and all the threats 
 of the Faculty, who blindly ignore it, are 
 impotent, a power that robs boys of their 
 independence, leading them to do things 
 foolish or worse and thereby to defeat 
 their own end. For in the long run, — in 
 the later years of the college course, — 
 the " not there " and the " there " can be 
 clearly distinguished. A student may be 
 poor, he may not play poker, he may not 
 drink, he may be free from all vice, he 
 may not even smoke ; and yet, if his 
 virtue is not showy, he will be popular 
 — provided he " does something for his 
 class." " He is a bully fellow," the students 
 say. " He is in training all the time." 
 
 I say little of responsibility to younger 
 students. An older student who misleads 
 a younger gets just about the name he 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 203 
 
 deserves. Even the Sophomore who se- 
 riously hazes a Freshman is now in the 
 better colleges recognized as a coward. 
 Cowardice once recognized, cannot long 
 prevail ; yet there was a time when it 
 took a deal of courage for a few young 
 men in one of our great colleges to stop 
 an outbreak of hazing. It took a deal 
 of courage ; but they did it. After all, 
 a student admires nothing so much as 
 " sand." What he needs is to see that 
 " sand " belongs not merely in war and 
 athletics, but in everyday life, and that 
 in everyday life "sand" may be accu- 
 mulated. A Harvard student, it is said, 
 was nearly dressed one morning and 
 was choosing a necktie, when his door, 
 which with the carelessness of youth he 
 had left unlocked, suddenly opened. A 
 woman entered, closed the door behind 
 her, put her back to it, and said, " I want 
 fifty dollars. If you don't give it to me, 
 I shall scream." The young man, still 
 examining his neckties, quietly replied, 
 
204 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 " You 'd better holler ; " and the woman 
 went out. Had he given her money, had 
 he even paid serious attention to her 
 threat, he might have been in her power 
 for life ; but his coolness saved him. An- 
 other undergraduate, who before coming 
 to college had worked as an engineer, 
 and who was a few years older than 
 most of his class, went one evening to 
 an officer of the college who knew some- 
 thing of him, and said, " I hardly know 
 just how I ought to speak to you ; but 
 in my building there is a Freshman who 
 is going to pieces, and a Senior who is 
 largely responsible for it." He then told 
 what he had seen, and gave the names 
 of both men. " If I look this up," said 
 the college officer, "are you willing to 
 appear in it? Are you willing to have 
 your name known?" "I'd rather not 
 be ' queered/ " he answered ; " but if it 
 is necessary to be 'queered/ I will be." 
 All this happened in a college which 
 employs no spies and discourages tale- 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 205 
 
 bearing. For anything the student knew, 
 the officer himself might think him a 
 malicious informer. The " sand " in the 
 hero of the first of these little stories any 
 boy would see. To see the " sand " in 
 the hero of the second takes some ex- 
 perience ; but " sand," and " sand " of 
 the finest quality, was there. This man's 
 notion of the responsibility of older stu- 
 dents to younger ones had in it some- 
 thing positive. "You have no idea," 
 said a senator to Father Taylor, the 
 sailor preacher, who had rebuked him 
 for his vote, " You have no idea what the 
 outside pressure was." " Outside pres- 
 sure, Mr. Senator ! Outside pressure ! 
 Where were your inside braces?" To 
 run the risk of being thought a common 
 informer when you are not, and to run 
 it because you cannot let a man go under 
 without trying to pull him out, requires 
 such inside braces as few undergraduates 
 possess. 
 
 Let me say, however, that there is no 
 
206 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 better hope for Harvard College than in 
 the readiness of the strong to help the 
 weak. A youth is summoned to the col- 
 lege office, behindhand in his work, and 
 bad in his way of living. The Faculty 
 has done its best for him, and to no pur- 
 pose. A student of acknowledged stand- 
 ing in athletics and in personal charac- 
 ter appears at the office, and says, " I 
 should like to see whether I can make 
 that man work and keep him straight." 
 This, or something like this, occurs so 
 often that it is an important part of the 
 college life. Moreover, when the strong 
 man comes, he does not come with the 
 foolish notion that he shall help the weak 
 man in the eyes of the college office by 
 pretending that he is not weak. He takes 
 the case as it stands, knowing that his 
 own purpose and that of the college of- 
 fice are one and the same, — to keep the 
 student, if he can be made into a man, 
 and otherwise in all kindness to send 
 him home. 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 207 
 
 One more responsibility needs men- 
 tioning here, — responsibility to our 
 work. In college, it is said, a man of 
 fair capacity may do well one thing 
 beside his college work, and one thing 
 only. Those of us who are so fortunate 
 as to earn our own living must spend 
 most of our waking hours in work. It 
 follows that we must learn to enjoy work 
 or be unhappy. Now we learn to enjoy 
 work by working; to get interested in 
 any task by doing it with all our strength. 
 This is the first lesson of scholarship : 
 without it we cannot be scholars ; and 
 only by courtesy can we be called stu- 
 dents. This is the first lesson of happy 
 activity in life. In athletics, in music, 
 in study, in business, we "train" our- 
 selves toward the free exercise of our 
 best powers, toward the joy that comes of 
 mastery. A college oarsman once de- 
 clared that after a season on the slides he 
 felt able to undertake anything. The in- 
 tellectual interests of a modern university 
 
208 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 are bewildering and intense. Among 
 them every intelligent youth can find 
 something worthy of his best labors, 
 something in which his best labors will 
 yield enjoyment beyond price. Right- 
 minded students see the noble oppor- 
 tunity in a college life ; and there is no 
 sadder sight than the blindness of those 
 who do not see it until it is lost for- 
 ever. 
 
 While speaking of the intellectual 
 side of college life, I may warn students 
 against becoming specialists too early. 
 Every study has some connection with 
 every other and gets some light from 
 it ; but a specialty, seriously undertaken, 
 compels a close study of itself, and may 
 leave little time for other study. An un- 
 enlightened specialist is a narrow being ; 
 and he who becomes an exclusive spe- 
 cialist before he has been in college two 
 years is usually unenlightened. Even 
 after the choice of a specialty, a stu- 
 dent, like a professional man, may wisely 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 209 
 
 reserve one corner of his mind for some- 
 thing totally different from his specialty, 
 and may find in that little corner a relief 
 which makes him a better specialist It 
 is good for a man buried in a chemical 
 laboratory to take a course in English 
 poetry; it is good for a man steeped 
 in literature to have a mild infusion of 
 chemistry. 
 
 The lazy student (if I may return to 
 him now) finds the thread of his study 
 broken by his frequent absences from 
 the lecture room, and finds the lecture 
 hour a long, dull period of hard seats and 
 wandering thoughts. Note-taking would 
 shorten the hour, soften the seats, sim- 
 plify the subject, and make the whole 
 situation vastly more interesting. No 
 matter if some clever students are willing 
 to sell him notes, and he has no scruples 
 about buying them ; the mere process 
 of note-taking, apart from the education 
 and training in it, gives him something 
 to do in the lecture room, makes it im- 
 
210 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 possible for him not to know something 
 of the subject, and shortens his period 
 of cramming for examination. I believe, 
 further, that a student's happiness is in- 
 creased by a time-table of regular hours 
 for work in each study. The prepara- 
 tion of theses, and the necessity of using 
 library books when other people are not 
 using them, make it hard now and then 
 to follow a time-table strictly ; but in gen- 
 eral such a table is a wonderful saver of 
 time. If a student leaves one lecture 
 room at ten and goes to another at twelve 
 and has no idea what he wishes to do 
 between ten and twelve, he is likely to 
 do nothing. Even if he has determined 
 to study, he loses time in getting under 
 way — in deciding what to study. Work 
 with a time-table tends to promptness in 
 transition ; and when the time-table for 
 the day is carried out, the free hours are 
 truly free, a time of clear and well-earned 
 recreation. At school the morning rou- 
 tine is prescribed by the teacher. At col- 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 211 
 
 lege, where it should be prescribed by 
 the student, it frequently breaks down. 
 A man's freedom, as viewed with a boy's 
 eyes, is liberty to waste time : it is the 
 luxury of spending the best ' morning 
 hours in a billiard room, or loafing in a 
 classmate's " study ; " the joy of hearing 
 the bell ring and ring for you, while you 
 sit high above the slaves of toil and puff 
 the smoke of cigarettes with the superb 
 indifference of a small cloud-compelling 
 Zeus. The peculiar evil in cigarettes 
 I leave for scientific men to explain ; I 
 know merely that among college stu- 
 dents the excessive cigarette smokers are 
 recognized even by other smokers as re- 
 presenting the feeblest form of intellec- 
 tual and moral life. At their worst they 
 have no backbone ; they cannot tell (and 
 possibly cannot see) the truth ; and they 
 loaf. Senator Hoar, in an address to 
 Harvard students, remarked that in his 
 judgment the men who succeed best in 
 life are the men who have made the best 
 
212 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 use of the odd moments at college, and 
 that, contrary to the general opinion, it is 
 worse to loaf in college than to loaf in a 
 professional school. The young lawyer, 
 he observed, who has neglected the law 
 may make up his deficiencies in the 
 early years of his practice ; "he will 
 have plenty of time then : " but there is 
 no recovery of the years thrown away at 
 college. 
 
 Once more, if we could only teach by 
 the experience of others, we should save 
 untold misery. I met not long since a 
 young business man who had been for 
 four years on and off probation in Har- 
 vard College and had not yet received his 
 degree. In college he had seemed dull. 
 He probably thought he worked, because 
 his life was broken into, more or less, by 
 college exercises, which he attended with 
 some regularity. Now he is really work- 
 ing, with no time to make up college defi- 
 ciencies, ready to admit that in college 
 he hardly knew the meaning of work, 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 213 
 
 and to say simply and spontaneously, "I 
 made a fool of myself in college." An- 
 other student, who did nothing in his 
 studies, who spent four or five thousand 
 dollars a year, and who constantly hired 
 tutors to do his thinking, was finally 
 expelled because he got a substitute to 
 write an examination for him. Home 
 trouble followed college trouble ; he was 
 thrown on himself and into the cold 
 world ; and he became a man. From 
 scrubbing street cars, he was promoted 
 to running them ; from running them to 
 holding a place of trust with men to do 
 his orders. " Every day," he said, " I 
 feel the need of what I threw away at 
 college. Do you think if I came back I 
 should need any more tutors ? I'd go 
 through quicker than anything, with no- 
 body to help me. What sent me away 
 was the one dishonest thing in my life." 
 The dishonest thing came about through 
 loafing. 
 
 Even socially, as I have intimated, the 
 
214 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 loafer seldom or never wins the highest 
 college success. Graduating classes be- 
 stow their honors on men who have 
 " done something," — athletics, college 
 journalism, debating, if you will, not 
 necessarily hard study in the college 
 course, but hard and devoted work in 
 something, and work with an unselfish 
 desire to help the college and the class. 
 At Harvard College in the class of 1899 
 all three marshals graduated with dis- 
 tinction in their studies. By the begin- 
 ning of the Senior year the class knows 
 the men to be relied on, the men who 
 are " there," and knows that they are 
 men of active life. 
 
 I have spoken earlier of a student's 
 responsibility to some unknown girl who 
 is to be his wife. What is his respon- 
 sibility to a known girl with whom 
 in college days he falls in love? Just 
 as college Faculties are blind to the ef- 
 fect of social ambition in students, they 
 are blind to the effect of sweethearts. I 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 215 
 
 do not quite know what they could do 
 if their eyes were opened ; for college 
 rules, happily, must be independent 
 of sweethearts. I mean merely that 
 scores of cases in which students break 
 rules, " cut " lectures, disappear for a 
 day or two without permission, and 
 do other things that look rebellious, 
 are readily accounted for by the disqui- 
 eting influence of girls. What students 
 do (or don't) when they are in love is 
 a pretty good test of their character. 
 One drops his work altogether, and de- 
 votes what time he cannot spend with 
 the girl to meditating upon her. He can 
 think of nothing else; and accordingly 
 for her sake he becomes useless. Another 
 sets his teeth, and works hard. " She is," 
 he says naturally enough, "infinitely 
 above me. How She ever can care for 
 me, I do not know ; whether She ever 
 will, I do not know ; but I will be what 
 I can and do what I can. I will do what- 
 ever I do as if I were doing it for Her. 
 
216 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 I am doing it for Her. If I succeed, it 
 will be through Her ; if my success pleases 
 Her, I shall be repaid." 
 
 No girl worth having will think better 
 of a man for shirking his plain duty in 
 order to hang about her. No girl likes 
 a " quitter ; " and most girls agree with 
 the heroine of Mr. Kipling's beautiful 
 story, "William the Conqueror," when 
 she says, " I like men who do things." 
 The story shows with profound and ex- 
 quisite truth how two persons of strong 
 character may grow into each other's 
 love and into an understanding of it by 
 doing their separate duties. To go on, 
 girl or no girl, without excuses small or 
 great ; to do the appointed task and to 
 do it cheerfully amid all distractions, all 
 sorrows, all heartaches ; to make routine 
 (not blind but enlightened routine) your 
 friend — thus it is that by and by when 
 you meet the hard blows of the world 
 you can 
 
 " Go labor on ; spend and be spent." 
 
 mm 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 217 
 
 Thus it is that you find the strength 
 which is born of trained capacity for in- 
 terest in daily duty. 
 
 On the banks of the Connecticut is a 
 school without a loafer in it. The schol- 
 ars are needy for the most part, and so 
 grimly in earnest that only a printed 
 regulation restrains them from getting 
 up " before 5 A. M." without permission. 
 I am far from recommending study be- 
 fore breakfast, or loss of the night's sleep ; 
 but I admire the whole-hearted energy 
 with which these boys and grown men 
 seize the opportunity of their lives. I 
 admire the same energy in athletics, if a 
 student will only remember that his ath- 
 letics are for his college, not his college 
 for his athletics. 
 
 One more caution for college life and 
 for after life. Do not let your ideals get 
 shopworn. Keep the glory of your youth. 
 A man with no visions, be he young or 
 old, is a poor thing. There is no place 
 like a college for visions and ideals ; and 
 
218 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 it is through our visions, through our 
 ideals, that we keep high our standard 
 of character and life. No man's charac- 
 ter is fixed ; and no responsible man is 
 overconfident of his own. It is the part 
 of every boy when he arrives at man- 
 hood to recognize as one of his greatest 
 dangers the fading of the vision, and to 
 set himself against this danger with all 
 his might. It is only the man with ideals 
 who is founded on a rock, and resists the 
 rains and the floods. 
 
 A vigorous young fellow, fresh from 
 college, went into a business house at 
 four dollars a week, and rapidly rose 
 to a well-paid and responsible position. 
 One day he received from a member of 
 the firm an order to do something that 
 he thought dishonorable. He showed 
 the order to the member of the firm 
 whom he knew best, and asked him 
 what he thought of it. 
 
 "Come and dine with me," said his 
 patron, " and we will talk it over." 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 219 
 
 " Excuse me," said the young man. 
 "Any other day I should be glad to 
 dine with you ; but this matter is busi- 
 ness. " 
 
 "Look!" said the other. "Business 
 is war ; and if you do not do these things 
 in business, you can't live." 
 
 "I don't believe it," said the young 
 man. " If I did, I should n't be here. I 
 leave your employ Saturday night ; " — 
 and, to the amazement of the firm, he 
 left it forever. 
 
 " And virtue's whole sum is but know and dare," 
 
 said a great poet in one of his great- 
 est moments. It takes a man with ideals 
 to begin all over again, abandoning the 
 kind of work in which he has won con- 
 spicuous success, and abandoning it be- 
 cause he finds that its methods, though 
 accepted by business men generally, are 
 for him dishonorable. 
 
 In and out of college the man with 
 ideals helps, so far as in him lies, his 
 
220 THE MISTAKES OF 
 
 college and his country. It is hard for a 
 boy to understand that in life, whatever 
 he does, he helps to make or mar the name 
 of his college. I have said " in life " — I 
 may say also " in death.'' Not long since, 
 I saw a Harvard Senior on what proved 
 to be his death-bed. The people at the 
 hospital declared that they had never 
 seen such pain borne with such fortitude, 
 — " and," said the Medical Visitor of the 
 University, " he was through it all such 
 a gentleman." A day or two before his 
 death an attendant asked him whether 
 he felt some local pain. " I did not," said 
 he, "until you gave me that medicine." 
 Then instantly he added, miserably weak 
 and suffering as he was, " I beg your 
 pardon. You know and I don't. It may 
 be the medicine had nothing to do with 
 my pain." I believe no man or woman 
 in the ward saw that boy die without 
 seeing also a new meaning and a new 
 beauty in the college whose name he 
 bore. As has often been said, the youth 
 
COLLEGE LIFE 221 
 
 who loves his Alma Mater will always 
 ask, not " What can she do for me?" but 
 " What can I do for her ? " 
 
 Responsibility is — first, last, and al- 
 ways — the burden of my song, a stu- 
 dent's responsibility to home, to fellow 
 students, to school, to college, and (let 
 me add once more) to the girl whom he 
 will ask some day to be his wife. " Moral 
 taste," as Miss Austen calls it, is no- 
 thing without moral force. "If," said a 
 college President to a Freshman class, 
 " you so live that in a few years you will 
 be a fit companion for an intellectual, 
 high-minded, pure-hearted woman, you 
 will not go far wrong." Keep her in 
 mind always, or, if you are not imagina- 
 tive enough for that, remember that the 
 lines 
 
 " No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 
 As I have seen in one autumnal face " 
 
 were written of a good man's mother. 
 
MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
 PHI BETA KAPPA POEM, CAMBRIDGE, JUNE 25, 1903 
 
 Again the song the fathers sang before us ! 
 
 The cheer that rings through voice and heart 
 again ! 
 The multitudinous triumphant chorus ! 
 
 The mighty mother marshalling her men ! 
 
 "Come — for behold the East and West are 
 merging ; 
 The frozen Arctic greets the scorching Line ; 
 Come, like the waves on strong New England 
 surging ; 
 Come, for to-day the seas and skies are mine ! " 
 
 And we, who own no queen on earth above her, 
 We, who from boyhood know her sovereign 
 sway, 
 
 Her sons, her knights, and every knight her lover, 
 Her minute-men — we hear her and obey. 
 
 A thousand more their loyal vows have plighted ; 
 A thousand more low at her feet have kneeled ; 
 
226 MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
 And every man, upspringing newly knighted, 
 Hath lifted high God's truth upon his shield. 
 
 And she, who wears the wisdom of the ages, 
 She, who in everlasting youth abides, 
 
 She, who her sons, the heroes, martyrs, sages, 
 From youth to manhood and to glory guides, — 
 
 " Go forth," she cries, " from strength to strength 
 forever ; 
 
 Serve me by serving God and man," she saith ; 
 " Steadfast, upright, of strong and high endeavor, 
 
 Fear nothing, and be faithful unto death." 
 
 For the message of the Master 
 
 Down the centuries has rolled ; 
 
 And the Pilgrims heard the burning word 
 
 Like Evangelists of old ; 
 
 In the cabin of the Mayflower, 
 When the northwind swept the seas, 
 In tongues of flame the message came 
 To the women on their knees ; 
 
 To the fathers of New England, 
 
 To the bold men of the Bay, 
 
 Who lodged in the lair of the wolf and the bear, 
 
 And the red man fierce as they ; 
 
MATER FORTISSIMA 227 
 
 And the grave young scholar hearkened 
 To the Master's high behest 
 As he watched the day fly far away 
 To the darkness of the west. 
 
 And westward still he watches, 
 The width of our wide land, 
 As he sits alone on a pillar of stone 
 With his Bible in his hand. 
 
 Be it mountain, lake, or prairie, 
 
 Be it city strong and fair, 
 
 Be it east or west that his eyes shall rest, 
 
 He sees New England there. 
 
 Be it east or west that his eyes shall rest, 
 New England stands the same ; 
 For God and the right, at the front of the fight 
 Are the men that bear her name. 
 
 For the message of the Master 
 She has breathed with every breath ; 
 And come what will, New England still 
 Shall be faithful unto death. 
 
 Harvard, all hail to the mother that reared thee, 
 Mother whose grace and whose glory thou 
 art! 
 
228 MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
 Hail to New England, who loved thee and cheered 
 thee, 
 Nestling thee close to her heroine's heart ! 
 
 Here in the wilderness bravely she bore thee, 
 Guarded thee, guided thee, prayed for thee 
 then : 
 " God in the pillar of fire be before thee ; 
 
 Child of New England, be mother of men ! 
 
 " Men who shall live in the light of thy vision, 
 Men who shall welcome at duty's command 
 Riches or poverty, praise or derision — 
 
 Men who shall work, with the head and the 
 hand: 
 
 " Not the dull heart of the meaningless stoic ; 
 Quick with the fires of unquenchable youth, 
 Quivering yet calm, like the martyrs heroic, 
 Living or dying, triumphant in truth." 
 
 From the North, from the South, from the East, 
 
 from the West, 
 They come, to be born again ; 
 To the North, to the South, to the East, to the West, 
 They go, to prove them men. 
 In the field, at the desk, at the court, in the mart, 
 With the joy in their eyes and the fire in their heart, 
 To struggle, to strive, to obey, to command, 
 To work, and to leaven the land. 
 
MATER FORTISSIMA 229 
 
 When the trumpet blew a shriller blast 
 
 And the loud alarum rang, 
 Marching, galloping, thick and fast, 
 Forward, forward, on to the last, 
 
 Forward again they sprang ! 
 Wounded and bleeding and dying and dead — 
 On to the last where the captain led, 
 Bursting the battlements overhead 
 
 Where the biting bullets sang. 
 
 Danger and death and devotion they saw ; 
 
 Harvard had heroes then : 
 Perkins and Dalton and Savage and Shaw, 
 
 Lowell, and Lowell again ; 
 First in counsel and first to ride 
 To death as the bridegroom to meet the bride — 
 
 Lovers and leaders of men. 
 
 There is one who knew them and loved them well, 
 
 Never a braver than he. 
 Like them he fought and like them he fell : 
 Yet he lives to wear with a soldier's grace 
 The scar of the sword-cut on his face ; 
 He lives to work in the wondrous light 
 That shone for the shepherds on Christmas night ; 
 With heart to love and with hand to guide 
 He nobly lives as he would have died, 
 For the truth that makes men free. 
 
230 MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
 The truth that makes men free — there came a seer 
 With radiant smile, whose eyes profound and keen 
 Burnt through the mist that shrouds the wildering 
 
 scene, 
 Of love and life and death, and saw them clear 
 As noonday ; who, serenely standing near 
 To the great heart of Nature, banished fear 
 From all that knew his presence. Where he trod 
 Is hallowed ground ; for, lo, he walked with God. 
 
 The truth that makes men free — behold, there came 
 
 A prophet with the poet's noblest art, 
 
 In stature like a giant, and in heart 
 
 Wide as the world, with lips and soul aflame 
 
 Christ and His church forever to proclaim ; 
 
 Impetuous, kingly, true, whose very name 
 
 Wrought righteousness, whose sweet and surging 
 
 voice 
 Lifted the saddened soul to wonder and rejoice. 
 
 The truth that makes men free — the scholar sweet 
 Who taught us how the daisy's poet sang, 
 Whose vibrant voice in mirth or sadness rang 
 Out from the warmest heart that ever beat. 
 Quick, generous, open, learned — him we greet 
 Once more in June, with roses at his feet, 
 To learn of him who knew as none shall know 
 The brave and simple songs of long ago. 
 
MATER FORTISSIMA 231 
 
 Harvard has heroes yet ; unspotted, brave, 
 Free-hearted, strong, rejoicing still in youth, 
 
 Even here the leader of our nation gave 
 His vow to live for righteousness and truth. 
 
 Harvard has heroes yet ; supreme, victorious, 
 Leader of leaders in the nation's van, 
 
 Marching erect, behold her captain glorious 
 Who gives his life to freedom and to man. 
 
 From the North, from the South, from the East, 
 
 from the West, 
 They come, to be born again ; 
 To the North, to the South, to the East, to the 
 
 West, 
 They go, to prove them men. 
 In the field, at the desk, at the court, in the mart, 
 With the joy in their eyes and the fire in their 
 
 heart, 
 To struggle, to strive, to obey, to command, 
 To work, and to leaven the land. 
 
 Again the song the fathers sang before us ! 
 
 The cheer that rings through voice and heart 
 again ! 
 The multitudinous, triumphant chorus ! 
 
 The mighty mother marshalling her men ! 
 
232 MATER FORTISSIMA 
 
 O mother whose benignant arms enfold us, 
 O heart of all New England, bravest, best, 
 
 Whose voice, forever strong and sweet, hath told 
 us 
 That life is work and work alone is rest, 
 
 God be thy guide as onward still thou farest ; 
 
 Still breathe upon thy sons the hero's breath ; 
 And still, as high and higher yet thou darest, 1 
 
 Fear nothing ; " be thou faithful unto death." 
 
 ' Altiora semper audes 
 Exitu cum prospero " 
 
 Professor J. B. Greenough 
 Harvard Hymn. 
 
EUctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
 Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 
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